Hard Favored Rage

by Don Shift

  Huerta grabbed his forehead. “We’re facing the literal end of the world as we know it and you guys are worried about neutering your carbines?”

  “That’s not all, sir. A lot of guys haven’t shown up as well.”

  Huerta nodded. “With the number of cops in the Guard, especially the units around here, I’m not surprised. That’s why me, Tran, and our merry bunch of adventurers are here.”

  “Well, we don’t have to go to Syria now, Major,” Tran said.

  “Yes, but they have air conditioning in Syria.” Huerta pulled off his cap and began fanning himself. Fort Benning may be humid this time of year, but at least it cooled off. “This is what I get for volunteering,” he said to himself.

  Mr. Church woke with the dawn. After using the toilet, he turned the tap on the sink. A trickle of lukewarm water came out. Then he realized that he couldn’t hear the toilet tank refilling. He looked at his hands. Thank goodness I’m careful. He sniffed an armpit and put on a copious amount of deodorant. Once he dressed, he hooked up his radio rig in the garage.

  The news was not good. Hams were reporting overnight looting in some of the less prosperous neighborhoods and runs on supplies from grocery stores all over. Police were responding from disturbance to disturbance. Reports of gunshots were common. Some sort of disaster network was keeping track of various emergencies. In Sun City, emergency medical resources were overwhelmed with critically ill or dying elderly patients. A combination of the heat and no life support systems was doing dreadful damage to the entire community.

  Several aircraft had crashed in the Tempe area after colliding with each other trying to land at Phoenix’s Skyharbor Airport. The general consensus on shortwave radio was that many of the aircraft, devoid of any digital navigation or flight control systems and lacking working radios had to jockey for landing position all on their own. One self-admitted former airline pilot felt that many of the aircraft that outright fell out of the sky suffered catastrophic computer failures which upset the balance in flight or the digital engine controls. Even so, many aircraft were able to safely land using any available flat surface that was long enough.

  Shortly before dawn, news began filtering in from the eastern seaboard. Only those radio operators who had spare equipment that were well-shielded from EMP had functioning equipment. Most cars did not work. The vast majority of aircraft in flight crashed. Transformer explosions were far more severe and so were the fires they caused. Some people reported they witnessed massive electrical arcs between powerlines. The devastation was far worse than out west.

  Harold did not like the chatter about how the population was going to shortly experience a massive die-off. Others were talking about “bugging out”. Those who had not left during the night were leaving this morning before the heat became unendurable. One person thought that as the afternoon heat set in, many desperate Arizonans would clog the freeways trying to get anywhere cooler, primarily to the north. The rest of the radio traffic was mostly conjecture or reports of what was happening within walking distance. He did not understand the talk about “skywave,” the alphabet atmospheric layers, or propagation.

  With the temperature hovering just shy of 90 degrees inside, Harold knew that evacuating to Sam’s house in California was unavoidable. He was digging the bacon out of the freezer when he realized his dilemma. The freezer was filled with a week’s worth of frozen food, mostly vacuum sealed bags of leftover spaghetti sauce, chili, and soups. He looked sadly at the food, knowing that all of it would go to waste. What was he supposed to do, just leave the food in the fridge to rot? And the house. Were they to just up and leave all of their possessions behind? He felt chained down by “what if.”

  What if the “experts” on the ham bands were wrong? What if this was just a temporary event? Harold turned the gas on the stove and laid out the first strips. He had two pounds of bacon to cook, plus the eggs. See the gas works. It can’t be that bad. He reasoned that it would be irresponsible for the electrical company to let all of the Phoenix metropolitan area suffer in the heat. If they didn’t restore power soon, they would be facing hundreds, if not thousands, of wrongful death lawsuits for letting such an important piece of the infrastructure fail. And if the EMP effect was some electrical surge, weren’t there circuit breakers someone could turn to restore the power?

  On the other hand, fixing the damaged transformers and electrical components might take some time. Mr. Church knew that it often took a week for some areas to regain electricity after an electrical storm, more so if the entire country was affected. After breakfast, he would go for a drive and see if he couldn’t find some Arizona Public Service workers at the nearest substation and ask them for their opinion. They must be there fixing the problem. If he could get an ETA on when the power would come back, he and Jenny could stay with Sam in the relative cool of Simi Valley until things were back to normal. Happy now that he had a plan that didn’t involve abandoning the house letting all the food in the refrigerator spoil, he decided to make some toast to go with the bacon and eggs.

  Sam woke up to pounding on his door.

  “Sammy, how do you like your eggs?” It was Marco, his LAPD officer roommate who worked out of the Mission Division.

  “Over medium and shut up!”

  “Well it’s almost nine, time to rise and shine. I’m grilling everything up so shake it out.”

  Sam propped himself up in a recumbent position with the pillows. He was fully awake, thanks to the adrenaline that dumped into his system, making his heart pound like the world’s fattest man trying to walk upstairs. A false-alarm adrenaline rush always made him feel like he was about to die. In Iraq, he never noticed the adrenaline in combat. Out of long habit, Sam reached for his phone to get caught up on the world before remembering it was pointless.

  After he had used the toilet, cleaned up, and dressed, he got up and followed the smell of cooking to the backyard. Marco was listening to a portable radio and grilling while drinking a beer. “You want a T-bone, ribeye, or New York strip?’

  “I want the ribeye. Did you cook up the tri-tip yet?”

  “It’s in the oven. I’m turning it into jerky.”

  “At least the gas still works. We saw a gas main break in the desert near Victorville. Huge pillar of fire reaching into the sky. Must have been fifty to a hundred feet tall.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Sam explained about Mrs. Huerta.

  “So what’s the Army going to do about all this?”

  “Beats me. Did they say anything to you last night at briefing?”

  “They called it a long-term grid-down emergency with no external help on the way. Grim stuff.”

  “Grim is right. Shouldn’t you be sleeping? Don’t you have to go in tonight?”

  Marco shook his head. “I don’t know if I want to go back in tonight.”

  “What?” the thought was unconscionable to Sam.

  “Look, we all shot the breeze last night and decided that once people figure out what happened and that the power isn’t going to come back on right away, things are going to look worse than Rodney King in 1992. No food, no water, hotter than hell. And how are they going to pay us? Nobody talked about that. All I got is $137 in my wallet. Got like, $37 grand in the bank between savings and my 401k. Or I did. That just evaporated. If I’m broke, then how do you think the city of LA is doing? Medium well work for you?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine.”

  “What about your sense of duty?”

  Marco laughed. “Duty to who? My partners? Half of them said they’d walk too. Be happy to police their neighborhood, but not the friggin’ ass end of LA. Ain’t worth it. Just a matter of time before they call our asses down to South Central to split some homie’s skull and find some way to punish us for it. I heard that a lot of places down there got broken into already overnight.” Marco handed over a plate full of greasy eggs and bacon. “You gotta eat a lot since the fridge is busted. After today, it’s all MREs and that camping stuff in the garage.”<
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  “Powdered eggs and milk too, yum,” Sam added sarcastically.

  “Oh yeah, I’m looking forward to that. Well, I guess I gotta say thanks for making me buy all that survival food and stuff.” It had been a requirement to move into Church’s house that didn’t seem unreasonable anymore.

  “My pleasure.”

  “Are you going to go in?”

  “Heck yeah. I’m not passing up something like this to hunker down inside and wait for the zombies to come.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Marco placed a beer in front of Sam and then brought his steak over. “Me, I just can’t throw my life away for people who don’t care about me or the things I do. If they didn’t give two shits before this, why should I expect them to now? I don’t owe them anything, no offense. It would be different if I was a cop here or something, but LA is the pits.”

  “I understand. Did LAPD have any plans for this?”

  “Nope. No plans, no orders. Just Tactical Alert. All the brass left the station after it happened and went downtown. They said to prepare for civil disturbances and patrol your beat. No dispatch, no computers, no phones, and the portable radios are little better than cheap walkie-talkies. Sorry, but those aren’t the conditions I want to be in at the end of the world. And what good would I be doing guarding a fricking grocery store in Sylmar. ‘Sorry ma’am, only one can of dogfood per customer, or I’ll have to kill you.’ With the way the department is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if they locked you up for shooting a rioter and then forgot about you when everyone in the jail went home.

  Marco started digging into his food and asked “So you’re into this stuff. How bad is it going to be? Really?” Sam explained the basics of EMP, the reports of war from the Army, and how dependent on electricity everything really was. “You’re kidding me, right Sam?”

  Sam shook his head. “Sorry. This is it man.”

  Marco didn’t say a word but ate in silence. His mind was racing. Intellectually, he knew since briefing that something was different about this power outage, but not like this. Sam had just said that life was never going back to normal. He would never watch another Dodgers game, he would never take another trip to Vegas, and he would never go to McDonalds with his partner for ice cream at 3 AM. Marco had about a month of dried food sitting in a plastic tub, none of which was bacon, beer, or steaks.

  While he was only halfway serious about deserting his job a few moments ago, now he was dead serious. There was no point to police work anymore. The jails wouldn’t function and people wouldn’t care about the law. What would Marco do, cut them a ticket for attempted murder or book them and let them out right away? His job, his retirement, his car, and his electric possessions didn’t matter. His money was gone. Virtually everything was different.

  Once Sam finished with breakfast, he kicked into gear. He found his analog scanner, screwed in the extra-long whip antenna, and started listening to radio traffic. East County was fairly quiet this morning, given the circumstances. The good news was that Dispatch was back on the air, but without receiving calls for assistance, they were more of a tracking function.

  Sam got up and punched his code into the gun safe. He was glad the safe’s electronics were too small to be affected by EMP. It popped open normally and he pulled out his AR-15 and a box of loaded magazines. When he became a reserve deputy, he was supposed to have removed the magazine release and installed a state-law mandated bullet button, but like many Californians he didn’t believe that was constitutional, so he ignored the law.

  Some deputies were uptight about that stuff. One of them took exception to a couple of cowboy reenactors hired to stage gunfights every hour at a country-western festival and made them put their guns away. When the bevy of anti-gun laws were passed in 2016, Sam didn’t even bother keeping up with them. He’d flash his badge to anyone who asked about it. And if they were going to arrest him…well Sam had given a lot of thought as to whether or not he should be the first person to make other cops think twice about enforcing unconstitutional gun laws.

  His personal rifle was a high-quality civilian semi-automatic reproduction of the authentic military-issue M16A4. Sam preferred the 20-inch barrel and taller A-frame front sight with an Aimpoint M4/M68 optical sight like he used as a Marine. The ridiculous ten round magazine California required was replaced with a 30-round magazine loaded so the final three rounds were tracers to alert him he was running out of ammo, just as he was taught as a Marine.

  The rifle was equipped with an infrared module with both a laser and illuminator. Thanks to his night vision goggles, PVS-15, to be exact—same as military issue—he could shoot at night just by aiming the infrared dot. A monocular could be mounted on the rifle with a standard optical sight, but each scope had to be focused in combination, complicating its use slightly. Sam wanted to be able to navigate quickly with night vision and since holding the rifle up to his eye while walking was impractical, he chose goggles. By contrast, a monocular worn on the head would leave one eye free for natural night vision and better depth perception.

  He also grabbed a tactical plate carrier marked “SHERIFF” and loaded six more 30 round magazines into it. He had a small ham radio handie-talkie (HT) in the radio pouch, already programmed to operate seamlessly on the sheriff frequencies. Other than a critically low battery the radio was perfectly functional. He made a mental note to grab the car charger from the cabinet.

  Next, he slipped his Smith and Wesson Bodyguard .38 revolver under his waistband. He always wore his backup gun underneath his main holster with the hope that anyone searching him wouldn’t notice the little gun underneath. He put a loose-fitting shirt, known as a “cover garment,” on over his holstered .40 caliber Sig P226. His duty Sam Browne needed a little dusting, which it got from a dirty sock. He debated taking out his Class B uniform but decided against it. He was aiming to be put back on the Special Enforcement Detail, his last assignment before that fateful overtime shift when he was injured, and plainclothes would look better.

  He thought about what else he might need. Nothing, at least not today. His Jeep bug-out-bag with everything else he might need, down to a change of clothes and an MRE, would make do. Sam shrugged and closed up the safe and closet, throwing everything he wasn’t wearing into bags and a rifle case, which went into the back of the Jeep. The low-fuel light had come on rolling into town last night, so he emptied the five-gallon jerry can of gas mounted on the back of the Jeep, along with the lawn mower’s fuel can, into the tank and left.

  Traffic was light in town. There was nowhere really to go. The usual Saturday morning events were canceled by default and shopping was not possible. Only the grocery and drugstores Sam passed had business. A lot more people were out walking around and simply enjoying the coolness of the morning. Seeing so many people out and chatting with one another gave the city an atmosphere of friendliness that it only had on major holidays.

  Driving the state highway through Moorpark was always miserable, working traffic signals or not, so Sam took the freeway. No one would bother him for speeding. Not a chippie was in sight. Had it not been for the urge to rejoin his comrades, he wouldn’t have unconsciously exceeded the 60 miles per hour fuel conservation speed limit he had set for himself last night. As he approached the last exit before descending the Conejo Grade, he came up on a line of traffic and a large cone and barricade pattern put out by Caltrans. They had even trucked in portable sections of K-rail.

  Despite his curiosity, he did not try to go around the barricades, which were formidable. Instead, he followed the traffic deeper into town, where plenty of cars got lost trying to follow the detour signs indicating they needed to go down the winding backroads. It took him half an hour, but he made it down the hill to Camarillo. He let his curiosity get the better of him and backtracked to the freeway. Since the southbound lanes were open, he got back on and followed them up the grade in heavy traffic. For some reason, everything was reduced to one lane.

  As he got to the curve at near
the Camarillo Springs exit, he saw what the problem was. CHP, Caltrans, multiple tow trucks, and even a crane were pulling cars and trucks apart. A huge mass of wrecked cars fully blocked the northbound lanes at the apex of the curve, just out of sight behind the hill for downhill traffic. Judging by the scorch marks on the concrete, the wrecks had spilled over on to the southbound lanes. A large area of blackened brush reached up the hillside towards the water tank on the hill. It looked like a far more deadly version of the cleared wreckage he and Raylene had passed coming into Simi last night. Sam estimated at least thirty vehicles of every sort still remained in the burned, tangled mess.

  He exited and looped back along the frontage road. In a small clearing, a highway patrol officer sat next to dozens of wrecks. Sam pulled over and showed his badge. “How many?”

  “Dead or cars? Close to a hundred cars. About half were just rear-enders. The rest got smashed up good and burned. Just a chain reaction that got going until people saw the smoke and slowed down. Don’t even ask how it started. All we can guess is one car lost power and somehow a semi crashed into it, then the rest just piled up.”

  “How many fatalities?”

  “At least 30, counting just drivers and bodies we can see. They’ll have to pull the cars apart and cut out whatever is left.”

  “Worst I ever saw was four guys on Pleasant Valley a couple years ago. Crashed head-on in the fog trying to pass another car and got their heads turned around for their trouble.”

  “Still better than that jet that crashed in Fillmore. 200 dead.”

  “I didn’t hear about that one.”

  “Gonna be a very long weekend,” the officer said.

  “Brother, you’ve got no idea.”

  As he drove towards Ventura, Sam was shocked to see several large airliners on the ground at the airport. Camarillo Airport was specifically a general aviation facility focused almost solely on small aircraft. Turning it into a commercial hub was rejected back in the ‘70s when the Air Force left. He wondered why they chose to land here on the comparatively short runway instead of LAX or Burbank where they were probably headed.