Hard Favored Rage

by Don Shift

  “Efren, no one would ever go for that. What we need to give them is a treat. A make your own sandwich bar.”

  “I don’t think that will work so good,” a worker said. “What are they going to use to spread the mayo? A spoon? Just wait until someone uses the wrong spoon and mixes mayo into the peanut butter. They’ll riot.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “I’m more worried about getting the calorie count right than jokes,” Jejomar said. The ex-Navy cook was usually a little more jovial than this. Efren thought it might be because his boss had planned to have dinner with his daughter who was flying back from the Philippines today.

  Efren couldn’t resist. “Let’s put some extra bread in the sandwiches, you know, like the Big Mac. It’s extra bready goodness.”

  Jejomar cursed in Tagalong and the chatter stopped.

  Stackhouse simply couldn’t believe how many people were too stupid to fight a fire. He had to show one couple how to spray a garden hose to dowse a shrubbery fire caused by a transformer. Aim at the base of the fire, don’t just spray it in the general direction of the flames. Another couple watched their house burn down because they had no idea how to put out a fire by yourselves. Unable to call 911, they stood and watched the damaged surge protector burn and slowly turn their living room into cinders before running outside. They couldn’t understand why the sergeant was staring at them as if they were imbeciles.

  Every fire engine had turned out to start patrolling the neighborhoods simply looking for smoke and driving to it. Most off-duty firemen ran to their nearest station to staff the extra engines. The off-duty cops? Well most cracked a beer and wandered around the neighborhood until they saw a patrol unit to flag down and ask what happened.

  Given that many Ventura County neighborhoods were built around the landscape, separated by brushy hills, gullies, and canyons, the areas with above-ground power lines were suffering their share of small fires. Luckily, there were still some quick-thinking citizens who managed to suppress many of the fires, and none grew out of control. Had it been windier, instead of a stifling, humid August day, the situation would have been far different.

  As any cop will tell you, nothing brings traffic problems like a brush fire. No matter how large or small, even if it was a house fire, sightseers and neighbors alike flocked to the smoke. On an ordinary day, half the units might be tied up directing traffic and warning people off for a fire that took an hour to control, but today Stackhouse and the deputies didn’t even bother.

  The traffic bureaus were busy driving from intersection to intersection responding to accidents. Most of the accidents were low-speed non-injury collisions because traffic was too backed up for anyone to really get up to speed. That was one little blessing. Once people realized the power wasn’t coming back on anytime soon, they left their jobs or whatever they were out doing and went home. Those at home or with nothing better to do drove around to find answers or simply out of curiosity. On the other hand the disfunction cut down on the paper calls for the deputies.

  It did not stop inane questions being launched at the deputies.

  “Can I help you?” Stackhouse asked a waving citizen.

  “My garage door won’t open.”

  “Is it jammed?”

  “No. The remote won’t work.”

  Exasperated, Stackhouse drove off without another word leaving the woman standing in the street looking after him. Already cynical from having seen both the depths of human depravity and the pinnacles of stupidity, he was appalled at how many people abandoned their cars in traffic. He shook his head at how many people told him there was a disabled car here or there that they had to drive around. Okay, so push it out of the way. At least most drivers who stalled on the freeway had sense enough to glide to the shoulder.

  The rest of the afternoon had not been much out of the ordinary as far as police work went. He kept an eye on the lines outside of the grocery stores. The banks in town simply closed with the failure of the banking system. Many of them would be burglarized by Monday morning and what little cash, if any, was left out of the safe would be gone. Unlike most Californians, Stackhouse had cash to spare. Even today, plenty of people still carried their pay in large amounts of cash but they spent it quickly.

  Target and the Walmart market were doing business. It seemed that a lot of the contractors and construction type workers were coming over from Home Depot to buy groceries.

  It made sense; they were often paid in cash, so they had it on hand. Many more had nothing. Three deputies were busy chasing down shoplifters and were as successful at it as chopping off the many heads of the hydra. As soon as one shoplifter was detained, two or three more would run out of the door and disappear between parked cars. All that could be done was to return the stolen items and cite and release the suspect. After the first few were lined up by the door it had an effect, however small.

  The sporting goods store in the same plaza was closed as well as Staples and Ross. Stackhouse cruised past the rear of the sporting goods store and saw one of the employees smoking out back. He parked and got out.

  “Man, I want one of those right now,” Stackhouse opined to the clerk.

  The employee held up a pack. “Want one?”

  “Nah, I can’t, but thanks.” Stackhouse held up his tin of Copenhagen. “What are you still doing here?”

  “Waiting for the district manager. Gotta get the ammo out of the store. State regulations. Can’t leave it here while the power’s out.” Stackhouse dimly recalled that the particular company had recently stopped selling guns due to onerous new laws but continued selling ammunition. “Why are the radio and cell phones out too?”

  Stackhouse explained what he knew about EMP. Both he and the employee agreed it was not good. “So did you guys get mobbed by people?”

  “No.” The employee asked, a little quizzically. “We closed after the power went out, then shut the gates after everybody went nuts down the way. There’s four of us, just waiting to go home now. We’re playing with the Nerf guns now.”

  An idea was forming in Stackhouse’s head. “Nobody cleaned out the store?”

  “We haven’t had a paying customer since lunch time. I was helping an old lady look at jogging shoes when the lights went out.”

  “Would you mind if I did a little shopping? I can make it worth your while.”

  The employee shrugged. “We don’t care. You got cash?”

  Two hundred and twenty dollars were folded into a secret compartment in Stackhouse’s wallet. “Yeah, but I got more at home. If I run there and come back really quick, we still cool?” The employee nodded.

  At home, Stackhouse threw the Tahoe into park and ran inside the house, yelling for his wife. She was not there. Probably over at Kate and Eric’s with the kids. In the bedroom, he got down on his knees and leaned his recliner over to retrieve an envelope that was taped inside the chair. Now he had over a thousand dollars. Racing back across town seemed to take forever as one car at a time advanced through each traffic light. He imagined arriving back at the store just in time to see an unsympathetic manager carrying out the last armload of ammunition and just shrugging at the deputy. “Sorry Sergeant, but we can’t ring you up without a working register. It would throw off our automated inventory and ordering if we did it any other way.”

  No smarmy manager was waiting. Instead, two new employees were out back getting stoned. Stackhouse laughed when the two teenagers tried to hide their joints. “We stopped caring about that at the last election.”

  Inside, the storeroom was pitch black but for a camping lantern that was setup to illuminate the path between partially broken open boxes of soccer balls and swim gear. Inside the store, the employees had setup a sort-of golf course for the Nerf guns and the other two were currently busy trying to knock a titanium backpacking pot off the head of a stuffed bear.

  In the camping section, a set of shelves was filled with Mountain House freeze-dried backpacking food. The bottom shelves held plastic tubs
of bulk food while individual meal packages occupied the rest of the space. In no time, he managed to fill up two shopping carts with $1,100 in food, water purification supplies, and batteries. Stackhouse slipped a fifty to the shift manager who was writing up a paper receipt and calculating the costs on her phone. “Funny how the phone still works even if it can’t get a signal,” she remarked.

  The employees helped him wheel out his overburdened shopping carts to the back door, the stoned ones laughing all the way about a cop shopping on duty for freeze dried food. If you only heard what I heard, Stackhouse said. Just as he finished loading the last bag into his unit, he saw that he was in full view of the traffic leaving the parking lot. Cars were now starting to circle back and come into the lot. One drove slowly past Stackhouse to see what he was up to. The female passenger stared accusingly.

  “Taking the opportunity to do a little shopping?” she asked rhetorically. Stackhouse didn’t reply.

  “What about people like us who can’t use our badges to open doors, huh?” the husband asked.

  “It’s every man for himself now,” Stackhouse weakly replied.

  Time to go. As he left the lot, several cars were now parked in front of the store and a few customers were knocking on the glass doors of the sporting goods store to be let in. Stackhouse swore at himself. Sooner or later with the employees refusing entry, they would get tired and leave. If by some blessed miracle it wasn’t the end of the world that every prepper deputy, science fiction addict, and tin-foil hat wearing paranoid citizen had been telling him it was for the past three hours, he imagined he would be getting a two-year letter of reprimand in his file. I’d give up a stripe for this to be just a nightmare.

  Command Decisions

  Presiding Judge Ned Fitzgerald strolled into Chief Villareal’s office. “Hope I’m not intruding.” The judge was in shirt sleeves and his tie had been loosened.

  “No, not at all, Judge.” Villareal got up and shook the elderly man’s hand. “I was going to come see you in a few minutes.”

  “I let all the courts out. No sense in trying to keep going on a Friday afternoon by the light filtering in the doorway.” None of the Ventura courtrooms had windows. “Word is, this is not just a black out.” Villareal explained what he learned about EMP. Fitzgerald’s face drained of all color. After a moment to digest it all, he replied “You know this means: a world without the rule of law.”

  “What’s that? No more courts?”

  “Not quite. Let me start with a segue. Take my name for instance. Fitzgerald comes from the Old Norman. That’s from northern France. It means ‘son of Gerald. Gerald quite literally means ‘rule of the spear.’ That is rule by force. The opposite is rule of law. By force, it is rule by intimidation and what you can make someone do by force or threat. By law, the threat of trial and jail is always there, but softer. The guarantee is not that deviation from the norm will result in capricious injury, death, or robbery, but that you will be protected along with everyone else as long as you play by the same rules.

  “It works quite well for us and has for hundreds of years, back to the Norman conquest in England. In the Old West we had our teething troubles, but we took to it quickly and well enough.”

  “I gotta disagree, Judge. We’ve always had law and order, at least since we became a state.”

  “Now I have to disagree with you. Lynching was the California way during the Gold Rush. Lawlessness can also occur when no one respects the law and it cannot be enforced. Morality is the same way. Thomas Hobbes was a philosopher with an accurate, if somewhat pessimistic view of human nature.

  “He said that in an uncivilized world, such as one after a devastating war, where the military, police, and government were gone, there would be no restraint on men. Law would be meaningless without men to enforce it and judges to pass sentence. Without the fear of law being the restraint, the only thing left would be power, exercised by a military or your own tribe. In the latter case, might makes right.

  “If no one had decisive force, then everyone would do what was right in his own eyes. If you were hungry, Hobbes said it was justifiable to steal food. As one crude Marine once put it, the world would quickly devolve into ‘kill or get killed.’ Life would be purely about survival and none of the finer things that make one want to live, would survive. It's been years since my days at Berkeley, but let's see if I can recall his quote. We still had to memorize these things in the late '50s.”

  The judge was silent for a moment, his eyes drifting up and out of focus: “‘Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them with all. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the Earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’”

  “I know that last part.”

  “Comforting, isn’t it?”

  “Is that what we’re facing?”

  “Chief, you would be the better judge of that. However, I will tell you what I know. My father was an officer in the US Army who fought in Europe. War ravaged Germany was far worse than what happened to France. Cities were in ruins. About half of the male population at the start of the war was either dead, captured, or disabled. There was little work and even less food. Germany was where he learned the term ‘food prostitution.’ When I served as an army JAG in the early ‘60s, he told me about his time in Germany.

  “Suffice it to say that any human vice was available for a can of rations, though for the most part we kept them from killing each other. When Berlin fell, the Russians killed men and raped, without exaggeration, nearly every available woman. During the Bosnian War in ‘90s, it was much the same, but tribal warfare with bombs and guns. In antiquity, it was the barbarians when Rome fell. Chief, if your information is correct, then I’m afraid the barbarians are at the gates.”

  Villareal, who had been attentively leaning forward in his chair, dramatically collapsed backwards. “Judge Fitz, that is not what I wanted to hear.”

  Fitzgerald chuckled. “I thought you were the bearer of bad news. I must admit, my own stomach is upset by all of this. Think about it. How long can you maintain order? How long before the deputies begin to desert?”

  “I’m thinking twenty-four hours out right now. The sheriff can make the hard decisions when he gets back.”

  “I have to confess I don’t have a high opinion of that man.”

  “Neither do we and I don’t think he is confident in himself either.”

  “Thankfully, he did choose a capable senior staff.”

  “Thanks Fitz. I feel like a little kid, hopelessly lost in a department store filled with angry people.”

  “That’s quite the analogy, but a good one.”

  “I guess, well all of us, really, have some hard to choices to make. Are you aware of California Government Code section 8572? Authority to commandeer private property?”

  “Where did you hear of that?”

  “It’s in the state OES Yellow Book. That’s the statewide disaster manual. Basically, the governor can order the commandeering of private property for government emergency use.”

  “I’m vaguely familiar with it, but you would need an order from the governor. I would imagine that you’ll get one presently, as soon as communications permit, that allows local authorities carte blanche.”

  “What if, uh, we preemptively took steps to secure the integrity of local facilities of interest? Or sent people on supply runs with county invoice books for later billing?” Villareal asked.

 
“It sounds dubious, both legally and morally, but as Hobbes said, might makes right. Besides, I doubt that anything that mattered before lunch matters now.”

  “Well, back to the practical. We’ve decided that it’s best to empty out the jails as much as possible. We’re going to get rid of all the non-dangerous inmates and triage the release of the unsentenced ones. For those who need to stay, we were thinking we could setup arraignments inside the jail. No way we can safely move people by flashlight, unlocking doors with skeleton keys, through the tunnel up to the courtrooms.”

  “I agree. I’ll see who I can wrangle up. I’ll take care of the DA and Public Defender’s offices, don’t worry.”

  “Thank you Judge. Will tomorrow work?”

  “It should, as long as everyone is flexible. As far as I am concerned, the courts will be suspended on a holiday until further notice due to circumstances beyond our control. We do have some extraordinary powers that we can invoke; if we have to. I was discussing this with my colleagues before I came over. We will do our utmost to help navigate this nightmare.”

  The men shook hands and Villareal walked Judge Fitzgerald out.

  “Tino!” someone yelled.

  Villareal squinted and saw it was the county fire chief, Rick Greer. “Chief, how’s it going?”

  “To hell in a handbasket. Fires everywhere, medical calls right and left as the ill and elderlies’ life support systems go down. I’ve got every available man running around putting out spot fires from blown transformers. A 747 went down north of Simi and a couple of smaller planes elsewhere. Thank God we have no wind and for the burn scars from the Thomas and Woolsey fires. Only one major brush fire. Can anyone tell me what’s going on?”

  “Yeah, EMP. You should go up to the third floor and talk to this guy Brad. Knows all about it. Made his own plan. Our own little deus ex machina.”

  “Good man, I was going to stop by there as well. So I was right all along. I knew right what it was when it happened. I’m still a little in shock. I came by to check on an elevator rescue in the jail. Is it a problem if I stop in?”