by Don Shift
Jerry Hinojosa, Ojai’s most famous panhandler and regular source of schizophrenic fun walked out of the darkness and approached the deputies. “I told you the Illuminati were going to do this!” Both deputies jumped and reached for their pistols. “You didn’t believe me when you took me on the 5150 hold!”
“Go back to whatever hole you’re sleeping in, Jerry!” Sibley yelled. The magic moment broken, it was time to get back to work. As they drove off, Jerry gave them both middle fingers. “Somehow, I think he’s going to survive just fine.”
“God help us when the really bad ones run out of meds.” Palmer crossed himself. “God told me to skin you alive,” he growled in imitation of a psychopath.
Sibley did not appear amused. He was quiet for a long time. “I’m not coming in tomorrow. Neither is my brother. We’re staying home for the duration.”
“You can’t do that!” Palmer protested.
“Why not? How are they going to direct deposit my paycheck? You know anything about this EMP? It’s the end of the world as we know it—TEOTWAWKI, SHTF. Every man for himself. What are you going to do when some desperate father knows that you got handed an MRE for lunch and his kids get to swallow a piece of stale gum? Or what happens when some cartel assholes from Mexico decide to go gunning for us? It doesn’t matter what we do, in a couple days, it’s going to be hopeless anarchy.”
“Then why are you here now?”
“Intel, and believe it or not, a sense of duty. When my shift is over, then I feel my obligation ends. Before I walk away, I want an idea of what’s going to happen and just maybe, help someone else before I go to the ranch.”
“What about your oath? Don’t you care about people?”
“My oath? To what, a broken state and country that failed to prevent this? For the cost of less than the yearly budget of NASA they could have helped mitigate this, but no, Congress did nothing. And you think I owe loyalty to California? Hell no, Governor Gruesome can kiss my ass. Look Dave, it’s me and my family right now. Not anyone else. Well, maybe yours, considering we’re related by both badge and marriage. Anyway, you know what I mean. If the people of California didn’t give a crap about preparing for themselves and they certainly don’t care about the job we do, except as society’s janitors, then I don’t care about them.”
They drove in silence for about a mile.
“I can’t give up until it’s useless,” David said. I’ll admit part of me wanted to drop my unit at the station and go home, but I couldn’t. Once I made sure my dad was okay, I saw all these helpless people looking to us. We had the information, we could do something. And I don’t think it’s hopeless. When the fire department was overwhelmed, citizens helped put out the spot fires from the transformers. I agree, it’s going to be ugly, but most people are still decent and want to do right by each other. We’re in a position to encourage and guide that as well as we can keep order. As long as I can do some good, I will, but I’m not giving up until it’s…it’s impractical.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m a deputy until it means nothing to be one.”
Sean thought about it for a minute. “Okay. I’m still going home tomorrow, but I suppose I can handle calls in the Somis area if it goes down. On horseback, with a cowboy hat, uniform regs be damned. And you know what Palmer? I love it when you get poetic. But you’re still a supercop. You think you can save the world.”
“Me? Supercop? I thought Church was always the supercop.”
“I haven’t thought of him all day. I hope he’s okay.”
“Knowing Sam, he’s breaking the sound barrier to get back here and is going to show up in full uniform at a station somewhere demanding unit keys.”
Both of them started laughing at the mental image knowing that it was far from an exaggeration.
Shortwave Radio
Harold went to the garage, which was now in the mid-90s, insulated garage door or not. He opened a beer and rummaged around in the storage racks hanging from the ceiling until he found a dusty box. Inside was an old vacuum tube radio that had been retired from active use in the ‘70s to become a decoration on an end table at his mother’s house.
He placed it on his workbench and carefully unscrewed the Bakelite cover. The inside was dirty. A few tubes were loose, and the solder had come off some wire connections. With an inverter attached to the battery of the car, he ran an extension cord to his workbench and plugged in a soldering iron. He used canned air to blow the accumulated dust from the electronics while the iron heated up. The dust made him cough and his eyes water, so he stepped back for a minute to let the air clear. Using the soldering iron and a magnifying glass, he got to work on the 80-year-old relic.
Sometime later, he was finished. When sweat started to fall on the electronics, he tore a length of t-shirt from his rag bin and tied it around his forehead. With the radio plugged into the inverter, Harold switched it on. For a moment, nothing happened, then the radio began to hum quietly as it warmed up, the vacuum tubes glowing brighter and brighter. When it was ready, Harold spun the dial, only to find silence. The antenna!
He felt a little foolish. He turned off the radio and unplugged it. Tucked behind his workbench was a dusty roll of old speaker wire. He had saved it to use as cheap, but strong twine on camping trips. It wasn’t hard to strip the double braid into single strands, then solder it to the antenna terminal. With the loose end strung back and forth in the garage, he had a usable antenna. Switching to the medium wave frequencies, then the 160-meter amateur band, he started picking up ham traffic.
Listening in, he found out the entire valley was indeed blacked out. A few hams had working generators, but it appeared that none of the automatic generators in facilities like hospitals were functioning. Fire and police were overwhelmed with calls. Many transformers had exploded all over the valley, including underground vaults. Several large passenger aircraft had fallen from the skies, while others were able to safely get on the ground. Traffic was gridlocked everywhere from vehicles that had lost control or otherwise crashed when whatever happened, happened.
Monitoring the frantic radio traffic from the Phoenix area was how Harold learned of EMP. Of course, he had seen it in movies but he never thought anything about it. Every major electrical appliance that was plugged in at the time was affected. Some cars failed, some did not, but many had random faults with the electrical and sensor systems. It was assumed that this was a nationwide event, but there was massive interference on other bands, which everyone attributed to the “pulse.”
Harold switched off the radio and disconnected the inverter from the battery. He went outside and checked the circuit breaker, finding all the switches had tripped. Next, he walked up the block to the electrical boxes that sat on the corner. Both were fine, but the underground vault, a concrete block with a manhole cover, had the dirt disturbed around its entire perimeter and their air smelled of ozone and burnt plastic.
By the time he got home, Harold needed another shower and a large glass of water. Between the hour in the garage and his little walk, he was overheated. He knew he wasn’t a young man anymore, but there was so much to do. He and Jenny played board games until it got dark. Both of them made no effort to discuss the peculiar events of the afternoon, he didn’t want to worry her by talking about what he had heard on the radio earlier. They finished their second sandwiches by candlelight. Jenny said she felt sleepy and went to lie down. Harold returned to the garage.
It wasn’t particularly difficult, nor particularly easy, to hook the inverter up with a flashlight jammed in his mouth. The radio hummed to life, just as before, and the airwaves were alive. Hams from all over the Southwest were calling in. The furthest east he heard was a faint transmission from West Texas, relaying information from even further east. Complaints about massive interference reducing range, creating impenetrable static, and random noise effects were numerous. Voices were very distorted and often were cut off mid-sentence. Strangely, traffic going west-to-east see
med to be better than east-to-west traffic.
The worst information traveled west. The general consensus of the hams was that the burst was somewhere to the northeast. No traffic whatsoever was coming out from east of the Mississippi except along the Gulf Coast and Florida. Some operators picked out very weak transmission in military bands, which they assumed to be airborne command and control aircraft or low-frequency emergency communications. Traffic on the fringes of the Midwest bore dire news.
Luckily a few ham operators in that area had their communications gear stored in Faraday cages, protecting them from the effects of EMP. Harold vaguely understood that these were metallic structures or devices that blocked radio waves as Sam had explained that the High-Tech Task Force used a small cage to operate suspect’s cell phones. According to the hams, metal boxes, old microwaves, and sealed metal trash cans all did the same trick to protect electronics.
A report from somewhere in Arkansas was that a huge pileup occurred, many hundreds of cars, when the EMP hit during a severe thunderstorm. First, several vehicles lost control when they lost power and collided. The other cars and trucks in rush hour traffic, approaching the scene, each with lost power or various electronic faults, hydroplaned on the flooded highway and kept crashing into the ever-growing pile of damaged vehicles. Eventually, it all caught fire, and that’s when the ham had to stop watching.
Vehicles and small, unshielded electronics seemed to work better out west than back east. One ham explained that the energy was less likely to disable small electronics at the fringes of its energy horizon, but the voltage delivered at the horizon would have been far greater than directly under the blast. Harold had no understanding of the physics and didn’t know what to make of it. No one had news from Washington or any government official higher than the sheriff or mayor. Fires were growing worse in some places, crime and rioting were on the rise in others.
Cars further east died, not because the burst fried their computers, but because the EMP energized the longest wires of the car. These wires acted like antennas and conducted the signal through the vehicle’s electrical system straight to the computers and their sensitive microchips. Vehicles underground, deep in parking garages, or even those lucky enough to be “shadowed” by buildings and metal parking shelters had the best chance. Cars further west received the least of the pulse’s energy protected by the car body alone, along with the existing electromagnetic shielding to protect car radios and cell phones from a vehicle’s electrical noise, and vise-versa.
All in all, it was a major catastrophe. After an hour, Harold had to turn off the radio and dismantle his setup just to keep his sanity. Back in the house, which was now only marginally cooler, he lit a candle and sat in his recliner. A little more than twelve hours ago, he had been sitting in this very chair and watching the news. There was a car show planned for tomorrow night that he had been interested in going to. He recalled vividly that he was eating a bowl of Raisin Nut Bran, a cereal that was annoyingly hard to find at the grocery store. Now the milk had spoiled and worse, the beer was warm.
It all seemed so queer to him to be in his home, sitting in the heat and dark, wondering if Charlie Aguirre was going to bring out his ‘56 Thunderbird, when the car show was cancelled as of 1:47 PM that afternoon, or so said the frozen kitchen clock. Part of him felt like he would wake up tomorrow to the chill of the air conditioner, strong running hot water, coffee brewing in the pot, and the usual dull Saturday morning shows on TV. But no, it couldn’t be that way ever again. It was like that moment when he realized that the numbers would never work out living in California and all the idle talk about leaving for Arizona would shortly become true.
Instead of the nauseating unease that had been shadowing him all afternoon and evening, Harold felt a little bit calmer. He knew what he had to do. There was no way that he and Jenny, even a “youthful” 60 years old would be able to survive the next two months of heat until Fall began. They had to get to California and stay with Sam until things were made better. For a long time, he watched the candle flicker without much in the way of thought, then blew it out and went to bed.
Jenny stirred as he came in and undressed.
“We’re going back to California tomorrow.”
“I never thought you’d say that,” she said groggily.
“Neither did I,” he said, starting to smile at the thought of going home.
A Hero Returns
It wasn’t until well after dark that Stackhouse finally found time to break away and investigate the whereabouts of his wife. The kids were happy to stay with Uncle Eric and Aunt Kate overnight, explaining that their dad was working late and their mom wasn’t feeling good. None of the neighbors had seen Mindy since before the EMP. Stackhouse even had the dispatchers check to see if she had gone to the East County station, but she hadn’t. A fear that once seemed improbable was now growing in his head. Fear wasn’t even the right word for it; it was more of like a bad omen. How many times had some a dead person’s loved one said, “I just knew something was wrong,” when he made death notifications?
In time the feeling became nauseating. He had to do something to relieve it and so he headed for the pile up at the bottom of the Conejo Grade. Stackhouse parked his unit on the left shoulder of the southbound lanes, just shy of the beginning of the wreckage. The fire department had the entire area floodlit with the lights from their Air & Light unit out of Somis. A CHP major investigation team was clustered up under a canopy. Stackhouse hopped over the rough concrete median and approached a CHP sergeant.
“Hey Nate, what’s up?”
“I’m looking for a car.”
“Lots of ‘em in there,” the highway patrolman said with a wave of his arm.
“My wife’s car.”
“Oh,” the other man said, suddenly grave. “What kind?”
“Silver Dodge Charger.”
The sergeant motioned Stackhouse to follow him up over to the investigators. “You guys got a Dodge Charger in there?” One nodded and told Stackhouse where to find it.
Stackhouse started walking into the massive wreck.
“You want me to go with you?” the CHP sergeant asked.
“No, I better go alone,” Stackhouse said.
It was only from small components that the mangled mess of twisted, charred metal and melted plastics were recognizable as being from automobiles. Here a wheel, there a piece of suspension, a strangely unburnt headrest lying on the pavement. The investigators would have to cut through the wreckage to identify each collection of burnt scrap by the VIN for the worst of it. The fire had burned about three quarters of the way through the resulting pile-up. It was around there that he saw the blackened front end of a Dodge Charger.
Steeling himself, Stackhouse kept walking. The front end was buried under the crumpled bed of a pickup. Scorch marks had licked the sedan all the way to the trunk. Only parts of the decklid and rearmost part of the quarter panel were still painted silver. Stackhouse shone his flashlight on the rear license plate. Adrenaline rushed through his body. He ran back to the front of the car and shone the light inside. His brain only captured the vague impression that a human had still been in the driver’s seat.
The rapid change in emotion made him unsteady and he began to tremble. Breathless from the release of tension, he staggered his way back outside of the caution tape. The assembled officers and firefighters saw Stackhouse’s relieved face and remained silent. It wasn’t her.
Chief Villareal returned to Headquarters at about nine-thirty. His heart leapt at the amount of lights he saw. The large, humpbacked mobile command post was operational in the parking lot, joined by the fire department’s equivalent, a Red Cross vehicle, an amateur radio setup, and a military command Humvee. It sounded like the backup generators were running. Chief Haden ran up to meet Villareal.
“Looks good!” Villareal said.
“Yeah, it’s great. We can finally get stuff done. While you were gone, they got the radio relay system setup. We’v
e got people out finishing up the supply runs and we’ve successfully taken that distribution center. So we’ll make it through tonight.”
“Any news?”
“Nope. The Navy sent a command group up. It’s just two guys, a lieutenant and a petty officer, but we can talk to the military now. Oh yeah. One more thing. Guess who decided to show up to the party.”
“Oh no, Dad’s home,” Villareal groaned. They had been doing so well without the sheriff.
“Don’t worry, he’s just standing around looking important.”
Sheriff Danny Tennant loved looking like he was in charge. He had an uncanny knack for knowing what calls would generate a media response and usually showed up looking resplendent in his best uniform, and this was no exception. He loved being on television and had proven it was possible to get elected as sheriff by simply appearing neighborly on TV. Supporters of his opponent, which would include the vast majority of deputies, contended Tennant won only because he went out of his way to proclaim he would refuse to report illegal immigrants to ICE.
Tennant’s administration had been a continuing train wreck. Deputies, fed up with spending up to years in jail before going to patrol, started to quit. The trend started to reverse when retirements picked up, but not enough promotions were happening to create the necessary turnover in the jails to get guys out in less than two years, as had been Church’s fortune, in the mid-2000s. Expansion of the Todd Road Jail lagged, but that was more of a general political issue than anything else.
The growing tide of resentment did win the staff and public some benefits, such as wash-and-wear uniforms and slightly greater respect for the non-sworn staff members. Even so, the “reforms” were just band aids meant to stem the worst of the department’s blood loss until Tennant could retire.