Hard Favored Rage

by Don Shift

  “How’s that?” David tapped his ear so his father would speak up.

  “Those frequencies are much more susceptible to interference. The ionosphere is pretty upset right now. Propagation is terrible. It will take a few hours for the airwaves to calm down. Anyhow, the frequencies transmit the ‘force’ of the blast, if you will, better. Like how water conducts electricity better than dirt. Got pretty lucky with the radios. If I wrecked over the hill in Chatsworth, I’d never have heard you.”

  “The hills block the signal?” VHF radio waves are line of sight only.

  “Well there’s that, but also the radio horizon. With your altitude on the mountain and me at the top of the hill, we could talk okay, but that was at the extreme edge of what our vehicle radios can do. Figure for me, thirty to forty-mile range, you, sixty miles or so. With a twenty-five-watt radio like you have, the altitude is your friend. The higher you go, the further you can see, which means the further your radio waves will go. Heck, the astronauts talk to hams all the time using walkie-talkies hooked up to a little antenna. It works because nothing is in their way. If you think about it, geographical shadowing probably helped us.”

  “What?” David asked.

  “Look around you.” Ventura County is sectioned by multiple ridge lines, some well over a thousand feet high, all the way to the backcountry where the mountains reached from a mile to nearly nine thousand feet. “The mountains protected us from full exposure. Remember the earth is round, so if the nearest exposure was fifteen hundred miles east, say over NORAD in Colorado Springs, even if it was several hundred miles high, we’re at the edge of the energy pulse’s horizon. We didn’t get full power.”

  “Sorta like the sunset in the mountains,” David said. “The sky is still light, and you can still see, but there is no direct sunlight.”

  “That’s right. Also these VHF radios are pretty robust and designed to handle exceptional voltages because you have both a receiver and a transmitter in the same package sharing the same battery and circuits. If they were more poorly designed, just pushing the transmit button would fry your own receiver circuits. The antennas are too small too. It’s only stuff with large antennas, like the commercial stations and your dispatch, that can draw in enough voltage to fry their circuits.”

  “How do you know all this stuff, Dad?”

  “Because I spend my free time doing other things than playing video games or watching Netflix like your brother in-law. Just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean you have to be a dumbass without a college degree.”

  David laughed. “Why was reception so poor immediately after the EMP?”

  “Attenuation of signal. Basically, the atmosphere gets a shock and the electromagnetic fields are disturbed by the charge. The effect sticks around longer depending on the frequencies. I’m sure you heard the same effect; no radio traffic, then very close, nearby traffic only, then back to normal. VHF frequencies clear in minutes, while the lower frequencies can take days. Might be Monday before we can get reliable shortwave broadcasts. All my shortwave equipment will be worthless too for a couple of days, if it isn’t fried outright.”

  “I’ll be honest Dad; it doesn’t match my expectations.”

  “It’s all pretty random. No one has ever experienced these kinds of effects before or even experimented with modern electronics and EMP. I guess everyone just assumed the worst that we’d be suddenly sent back to the 19th century. Remember that the last time this was studied empirically, JFK was president and all radios used vacuum tubes.”

  “What’s the difference? Sure, we have cars, our radios, and little electronics here and there, but for how long? No one is going to be refilling gas station tanks, charging batteries, or delivering food. Without electricity, running water, and working stores, society is going to go to hell in a handbasket in a matter of days. Hours when they find out the back room of the grocery store is just a place to unbox deliveries…” David trailed off. He should be sitting in front of Vons with a shotgun right now. He shook off the thought.

  It wasn’t long, given the speeds David was driving, before they reached the family home in Ventura. “Okay Dad say ‘hi’ to Mom for me. I don’t know when I’ll get off, but I’ll try to let you know.”

  “Be safe. My radio will be on, you know the drill. I’ll check on your sister and Brooke.”

  “I forgot about Brooke. What kind of husband am I?”

  Mr. Palmer laughed. “She’s a tough girl who will be fine. She’s just as crazy as we all are.”

  “Love you Dad.”

  “Love you too. Wait, hold on a sec.” Mr. Palmer disappeared in the house. He was back two minutes later with a handheld ham radio and car charger. “There. Now you can talk to me without any radio games.”

  “Thanks Dad.”

  “You’re welcome. Be safe.”

  Half an hour later, after his fourth high speed trip up windy Santa Paula Canyon, David parked his car at the tiny Ojai police station. He noticed with disapproval that the front gate had been manually cranked open and left that way. He wondered if the evening briefing would shed some light on the situation and answer the questions he had. For one, what would the department be in the morning and what would it mean to be a cop post-apocalypse?

  This Isn’t a Blackout

  “Dad, the Internet doesn’t work.”

  Sergeant Nathan Stackhouse jolted awake. The sunlight streaming in the open bedroom door stung his eyes. Working nights during middle age did not agree with him.

  “Gimme a second honey,” he said to his daughter Misty as he fell back against his pillow.

  Stackhouse figured it was sometime after noon, but several hours before his usual wake-up time. He adjusted to working nights fairly well, as long as he could get seven hours of uninterrupted sleep with a natural wake-up. When does school start again? he wondered. After a moment, he sat up. “Hand me your iPad, sweetie.”

  Eyes still bleary, he looked at the time at the top of the display. About two o’clock. Close enough. He could lay in bed for another hour and then go into the station a little later than usual, but still make the 5:30 shift change. There was no Wi-Fi symbol, so he got up and stumbled his way into the office area of the great room at the other end of the second story. The lights were dark. He flipped the power switch and hit the reset button, but nothing happened. “The power’s out, pumpkin.”

  “But you said because it had the battery the Wi-Fi always stays on.” She was smart for a seven-year-old.

  “Well, I guess not.” He was too tired to care or to wonder why the automatic power backup wasn’t working. “Go play with your dolls or read or something. What is your brother doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me sleep for another hour.” He trudged back into bed and lay down in the semi-darkness afforded by the blackout curtains. If the power wasn’t back on by the time his wife Mindy came home, Stackhouse was sure that she would wake him up to ask why the garage door opener wasn’t working. Just one more hour, he pleaded with himself.

  He drifted through a twilight sleep before finally waking up fully. It was earlier than he would have liked, but the grogginess would pass with his first cup of coffee and a shower. The alarm clock was dark. Oh yeah… Like many younger people who used their multipurpose phone as a clock, alarm, watch, and everything else, Stackhouse reached for his cell on reflex. It came to life and showed him it was ten to three. Good.

  There was no service. Must be the heat. Probably shorted out a substation and the entire county is dark. Back when he was a slick sleeve deputy, he remembered when a transmission line went down and all of the southland counties were blacked out. The traffic was epic. Being a Friday night, this was going to be one interesting shift. He decided to get up and shower right away. He was going to go in as soon as Mindy got home.

  Power outage or not, there was always hot water. The afternoon light was perfect for shaving in the steam-proof mirror that hung from the showerhead. Washing up, he wondered why
the generators for the cell towers didn’t kick on. Matter of fact, the Internet router should still have power from the backup, even if the local cable office’s servers were offline and not sending data. Stackhouse got out of the shower and wrapped himself in a towel.

  “Hey, what time did the power go out?” he yelled out the door.

  “About 1:45,” his son Caleb yelled back.

  That wasn’t enough time for the generators to run out of fuel or for the battery to die. Stackhouse didn’t immediately run out of the bathroom. Owing to the heat, he made sure to put on a few extra swipes of deodorant before putting a clean pair of boxer shorts.

  “Ew, gross Dad,” Caleb said, as his father ran down the stairs.

  “Son, as long as you’re grossed out by a half-naked man, I’m proud of you,” he said.

  In the garage, Stackhouse dug through the camping/earthquake supplies bin on one of the shelves until he found a battery powered radio. He extended the antenna and turned it on but heard nothing. Even out in the backyard, both AM and FM bands were static. Upstairs in the office, he turned on his scanner, but the batteries were dead. It was a rechargeable unit, so raiding the remote controls for four AAs wasn’t going to fix it.

  “Caleb, have you been playing with this?” The boy shook his head. “Then why are the batteries dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Stackhouse growled. He went back into his bedroom. Between the shower and the heat of the afternoon soaking into the house, now that the AC was off, he was sweating and needed to wipe his forehead. Stupid humidity. He got dressed, dug through the camping supplies for the percolator, and brewed up coffee on the, thankfully, gas stove. After he finished his first cup, he yelled “Hungry?” to the kids.

  In an instant, both were downstairs and bright eyed. “Pizza?” Misty suggested.

  Stackhouse made the wah-wah sound of a disappointed trumpet. “Can’t if the phones are down.”

  “Mom bought frozen pizza. We can put it in the oven,” Caleb said. He was a bright lad.

  Stackhouse shrugged. “Whatever, it’ll make the house hot. Glad I don’t have to sleep here tonight.” He was sergeant of the Special Enforcement Detail (SED), or a plainclothes hybrid of patrol and detectives; a sort-of city version of the larger Gang Unit. They had a great tip about a wanted felon being in town for his birthday. He hoped to have the fugitive booked in the jail by sunrise.

  The kids “helped,” which included preheating the oven and opening the boxes. It was left to Dad to carefully peel off the plastic without disturbing the toppings and transferring the pies to their baking sheets. Stackhouse set his watch timer to thirty minutes and went to sit on the front porch where it was slightly cooler to finish his second cup of coffee.

  Not long after he was out there, a neighbor walked up. “Hey Tony.”

  “Hey Nate. Any idea what happened?”

  “Nope. Guessing a blackout took out the power for the whole area. Too many people running their air conditioning.”

  “That’s what I thought too, but the cell service is out and there isn’t anyone on the radio. Can you hear anything on the scanner?”

  “Nope, kids drained the battery and didn’t recharge it.”

  “Great. I heard a lot of sirens earlier.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me. Lots of old folks dependent on oxygen and whatnot. Elevators stuck between floors, that kind of stuff.”

  “Yeah.” Tony looked at the ground and rubbed his toe on something. “You going into work?”

  “As soon as Mindy gets home. Seems too unusual to wait.”

  “Sounds good. Holler if you need anything.”

  Stackhouse was thankful that he worked tonight. Being stuck home in the heat to entertain the kids was not going to be easy or fun. Mindy’s problem. Both kids would soon grow tired of whatever off-line games they had on their iPads and portable games. At their age, Stackhouse would have been reading a book, electricity or not. Well, they could swim in the hot tub tonight, which was cooling off already.

  Hearing the occasional siren, which seemed more frequent than usual, he felt antsy. He should be at work by now. It was four-thirty, and he simply couldn’t wait anymore.

  “Okay guys, I’m taking you over to Uncle Eric and Aunt Kate until your mom gets home. We’ll wrap up some leftovers and take them some cold pizza.”

  They were both excited at the prospect of spending time with someone other than their parents. “Can we put some pizza in the fridge for mom?” Caleb asked.

  “Of course.”

  Stackhouse left a characteristically curt note on the garage door: Kids to Eric/Kate. Into work. I smell overtime! The short ride across town was actually easier than usual as the three traffic lights that ordinarily seemed to hold up traffic, let cars take turns and flow through. Most Camarillians seemed to understand that a dark intersection worked the same way as a four-way stop.

  Stackhouse parked in front of a condo complex and let the kids out of the car at his brother’s place. Kate answered the door.

  “You’re home,” Stackhouse said.

  “Yeah, just got here.”

  “I expected they would keep you at school longer.” Kate was a teacher.

  “No, they let all the kids go home. Except those who couldn’t walk, but they had enough volunteers to stay behind with them, so I left,” Kate said.

  “Eric home?” Kate gestured to the bathroom. “Oh. Look, Mindy isn’t home yet and I gotta go to work. I don’t mean to dump them off on you, but I don’t have anybody else.” The Stackhouses’ parents lived on a few acres in the foothills outside of Bakersfield, what they dubbed “the ranch.”

  “We brought pizza,” Misty said, offering up the foil wrapped plate.

  Kate laughed. “That’s okay sweetie. You don’t have to bribe us. We’ll play games until your mom comes home.” She looked at Stackhouse. “Eric was saying there was a huge accident at the bottom of the Grade and traffic is backed up over the hill for miles. He had to take the backway home. Mindy might be stuck in it too.”

  Stackhouse nodded in agreement and said his goodbyes. Surely Mindy dawdled at the mall or whatever, expecting the power to come back on shortly. With traffic backed up from everyone headed home in the usual Friday afternoon traffic, it might take her an hour to get home, and that was only from the next city over. He should have paid attention to which mall she said she was going to after work. Even if she went into LA, she would be home well before dark, he hoped.

  Through the Looking Glass

  Chief Faustino “Tino” Villareal sat in his desk chair stroking his chin with his fingers. He had been staring out at the glare of the sun reflecting off of cars in the parking lot for ten minutes now. His eyes told him that everything looked relatively normal. Sure, the parking lot was emptier than a courthouse parking lot should be after lunch and not much was moving, but it was still reassuringly normal. His other senses told him otherwise. The room was beginning to get noticeably warm. Not uncomfortable, but hotter and stuffier than an air-conditioned office should be. The quiet hum of all the office equipment; fans, faxes, phones, and computers were also gone.

  As a Chief Deputy—the rank seemed to switch between that and “Assistant Sheriff” between every other election—he was in charge of the patrol division, making him, by seniority, the third ranking member of the department. This was very important today. Sheriff Tennant was in the Santa Barbara wine country with his wife at some sort of spa. He wouldn’t know the full extent of the emergency for a few more hours. Undersheriff Kimmel was fly fishing in Idaho; he would never be coming back, if what he been told had happened, given the circumstances.

  Villareal was dozing at his desk when the EMP came. All he noticed, being half-asleep, was that the air conditioner turned off. Not unusual in a building pushing 40 years old. About five minutes later, the public information officer, Sergeant Toole (the irony was not lost on him or anyone else), knocked on his door to announce that the watch commander had just walked over from
Dispatch to announce they were off the air. The rest of the information came in a flash. Cell phones were down, the landlines were down, and maintenance was trying to manually start the generators. The jail was on lockdown, mostly by default. The bailiffs were evacuating courtrooms.

  The chief deputy walked across the parking lot to Dispatch with the watch commander Captain Tejada, who normally ran the SWAT team. Neither of them had the faintest idea of what was going on. Oddly enough, a golf cart was running and headed straight to the front door of Dispatch. A county technician jumped out, grabbed a toolbox, and headed inside. Out of long habit, he swiped his ID card at the terminal, which didn’t work. It took him a second, but he realized what he did, laughed, and unlocked the door with his keys. The chief and watch commander found him in Dispatch talking with the supervisor.

  “Do you know what happened?” Villareal asked.

  The tech nodded emphatically. “Oh yeah, for sure. EMP. Fried everything. Toast. I was testing some portable radios at my bench and had the testing equipment running. I saw the pulse man. I literally saw it as it hit the gauges. Oscilloscope freaked out before it died and the needles pegged. Insane numbers, like all nines. I have no idea if the S-meter actually hit 9,999 ohms or not, but the juice was just immense.”

  “What’s an EMP?” asked the dispatch supervisor.

  “It stands for Electro-Magnetic Pulse. A nuclear explosion in the high atmosphere, near space, can cause it. It creates an immense pulse of charged electrical particles that gets amplified by where it is in the atmosphere, space, and it shoots down through the sky like lightning, seeking a path to the ground. It’ll charge anything with enough of an antenna to induce a charge. We’re talking not just radio antennas, but power lines, telephone lines, heck, even cars with enough unshielded wiring will pull it in. The pulse is so powerful that it basically fries electronics by giving them too much voltage to handle.”