by Don Shift
The most unsettling thing that happened overnight was that the largest talk radio station in the area, KFI 640 AM, was back on the air. Designated one of the emergency radio stations since the 1950s, it was filling that role and was the only station being received in Ventura County. Two hosts, their usual morning guy and a military expert, were repeating the same information. Without any way to call into the station, all they could do was report what they’ve been told. At least one reporter was monitoring several scanners, police, fire, and amateur/CB radio for information. The news coming out of LA wasn’t good and was frightening.
Last night, things had been fairly peaceful because no one really knew what was going on. It was unusual, but no more so than after an earthquake. Power outages had been dealt with before. Most people remembered when the whole Southland had lost power for an entire afternoon. The weekend would be ruined, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Since it was also a Friday when the pulse occurred, many people simply headed home for the weekend if they weren’t already there. Businesses were still staffed, so they locked up when it became too dark to conduct sales. Extensive looting didn’t occur, although burglars and robbers took advantage of the darkness and busy police to do what they would be doing anyway. Most people took it as a lark and a good way to spend the evening outside with neighbors.
Once people started turning on working radios and hearing the news, information spread via word of mouth like wildfire. Of course, “high altitude nuclear explosion” got warped in the game of telephone into nuclear war. Had anyone bothered to listen to the radio for five more minutes, the on-air military expert would have set them straight. Still, he would rather have people walking around with paper masks on to protect themselves from non-existent fallout, instead of claiming aliens did this or publicly flogging themselves to atone for whatever brought on “the wrath of God.” In this case, ignorance was bliss. Very few correctly understood what happened. The rest simply panicked.
The expert was pulling no punches. Villareal wished that the host was little more tactful and discreet, but that was the cop inside him talking. It was the hosts’ job to tell the truth to the public. The other host, who liked making fun of preppers before Friday, was falling all over himself for being so wrong. Villareal remembered listening to him on 9/11. He was talking in that same grave, slightly condescending tone again, except he was a little dazed about it all. The morning host just couldn’t come to terms that many millions of people would die and there was no help coming. It wouldn’t surprise the chief at all if the LA county cops shut down the studio soon.
As he expected, Villareal was once again in charge. Tennant had reported into his office at East County and was pretty much just strutting around. He gave an order last night not to use supplies from a retail distribution center that eight deputies were currently guarding, although he was comfortable with protecting it against looters. Villareal thought that Tennant felt uncomfortable about all the supply grabs and put the kibosh on them until it became impossible to avoid a decision. Word had trickled down that the sheriff had two men guarding his Cessna out at Camarillo Airport. Everyone on the department knew Tennant was a poseur, but it was a bad portent.
Two dispatchers had been setup. To avoid problems with mountains blocking radio signals, west county traffic was split so the northern units had their own frequency. Most of what the dispatchers did was copy down information long hand. Unit status was done using a white board. A magnet moved left if unit was 10-8 (in service) and right if it was 10-6 (busy). It was a far cry from computer-aided dispatch. Deputies were constantly radioing in problems, mostly dead body calls. The coroner had decided that no autopsies would be conducted in non-criminal cases and setup a system for the local mortuaries to go from location to location picking up corpses. As for what would happen with the corpses, no one knew. He made a note to ask about a mass grave site.
At least today the chief had more information about what had happened, thanks to the military. Ammunition and food had been delivered to the National Guard. Plans for deploying the regular Army were rumored to be in the works. The governor had declared martial law, but no one knew exactly what that meant. Well, at least the jail situation was finally being worked out. The last load of inmates was going to Todd Road, which now housed just 196 of Ventura County’s worst residents.
Villareal decided that he wanted Brad’s opinion on what today was likely to bring. He found the young man sleeping with his head on a folding table in a dark room.
“Brad. Brad.” With a flashlight in one hand, he smacked the table with his palm. “Brad!”
“What?!” Brad shouted.
“Sorry. I need your opinion on something. Then you should go home for a couple hours.”
“Okay.” Villareal asked about how Brad thought people would react to the radio. “Badly. Before, they were worried, but they didn’t have anything to focus those worries on. In the absence of any bad news, no news really was good news. They could, at least subconsciously, pretend that everything was going to go back to normal. Now that the news is getting out that this is permanent and far-reaching, they’re afraid. The public will panic. Grocery stores are going to be stripped like after an earthquake. Bad guys will slip into opportunistic mode. There will be price gouging, hoarding, and riots. Today and the next few days will be ugly and it’s only going to get uglier.”
“What about after?”
Brad shrugged. “Depends, but there might not be an ‘after.’ Do people get enough supplies to survive? Can we stabilize things? How bad does crime get? We’re at Stage Two, panic. Stage Three will be urban warfare. Stage four is anarchy and there is no stage five.”
“What do you mean by urban warfare?”
“What did I say? Sorry, I’m exhausted.”
“Urban warfare. Nevermind. Go get some sleep.”
“Sure thing.”
Urban warfare and anarchy. Now those were ugly terms. Villareal didn’t know if he was better off as a chief deputy or if he should be wishing he was a slick sleeve dealing with disaster at the street level.
By sheer luck, coincidence, or the Great Pumpkin, after a six-hour search and near-panic attack, Stackhouse managed to find his wife walking along Santa Rosa Road near the city limits. After an overjoyed reunion, he drove her home, which she jokingly almost refused, proud of having come twelve miles by foot. Rather than anything sinister, she ran out of gas and spent two fruitless hours trying to get someone to sell her a few gallons to get home. Since none of the gas station owners had thought of siphoning gas from their tanks at that time, she put on her sneakers and walked a few miles to the East County station, where the message to her husband fell through the cracks and was not passed on.
His apologies were profuse. He was overwhelmed and assumed the worst had happened. It wasn’t until he stopped at the massive wreck that he thought to double-check the backroads beyond the city itself, in the process partially redeeming himself. There was even pizza still leftover at home for her and since she was not a picky eater, she wolfed it down.
By the next morning, someone dropped off a message that SED was going to form up as a tactical squad and not to report into patrol. That was fine with him.
Someone knocked on the door. It was Mr. Gallagher from down the street. “Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to let you know what’s going on.”
“What’s up?
“My daughter, she was going to the store and two men flagged her down at the light outside of the complex. She’s naïve, God bless her, but they carjacked her and took her behind that business park over there. She says they tried to rape her, but she kicked one of them in the nuts and then someone came out and scared them off.
“How is she?”
“A few bruises and some cuts from getting away and getting home, but physically, no worse for the wear.” Mr. Gallagher cleared his throat. “I think she is more angry than anything. I’d hate for her to be traumatized though.” Stackhouse nodded in understanding.
> “If you write down her license plate and vehicle description, I’ll keep an eye out for it.”
“I would appreciate it.”
“It’s nothing. Look, I’d like to mention something else that I heard soldiers did in Iraq after bad attacks. I’ve done it a couple of times after some rough cases. It isn’t much but given that we don’t have much to work with, it might help ease some of the trauma.”
The father nodded.
“Have her take some Benadryl or Tylenol PM twice a day. The diphenhydramine in it will help her to sleep. It also acts as a mild dissociative so she will feel apathetic about her ordeal. She’ll feel out of it and very groggy for the next two days or so. Let her sleep as much as possible. After two days, stop giving her the medication. Any longer and her body will build up a tolerance to it.”
“Are you guys going to be able to keep things under control?” the neighbor asked. “Seems a little odd that not a day later these guys are trying to rape young girls in broad daylight.”
“You’d be surprised how fast things can go downhill. A few years ago, I was skiing up in Tahoe when the Interstate shut down. We got stranded in some two-bit town. Hundreds of cars and trucks taking up every bit of road and parking lot. By dark, the snow was three feet deep. The only restaurant in town was packed and started turning away everyone but customers who were trying to use the bathroom. People were pooping in the street. I saw one guy get socked in the mouth for accidentally tossing snow through a partially open window of the car next to him.
“When the restaurant ran out of food, people were pounding on the windows and someone threw a chair through the plate glass. By nine PM, CHP had to come up behind a snowplow to keep the peace. Half a day and it was madness, all because people were stranded in the snow. It’s like that episode from the Twilight Zone; a crisis is just revealing the worst in some people,” Stackhouse said.
Gallagher left. It dawned on him how easily it could have been his wife or his sister-in-law. Mindy was a strong woman, but no match for two thugs and counting on a lucky kick to the gnards was not a good plan. He wished he had a better gun for her than her cheap pocket pistol and another for his sister-in-law too. Prior to that doomed Friday, Stackhouse regarded the Golden State’s gun control as something that made his job easier. Find a gun on somebody? Instant bad guy. Most of the law abiding were too afraid of the consequences to carry a gun.
He never got around to purchasing an AR-15 for his home; one was issued to him. Asking for a law enforcement exemption letter from the assault weapons ban now was such a trifling thing. Hadn’t he been at headquarters at least once a week, yet he couldn’t spend a few minutes to ask for a simple letter? His backup/off-duty gun was still a revolver for the same reason. A nice subcompact Glock would be nice to have right about now.
Fortunately, he had his childhood .22 caliber rifle and his father’s ancient deer gun. There was a brick and half of .22 in the garage somewhere next to a few ancient boxes of .25-06, a semi-obscure caliber, made when anyone could walk into a hardware store and exchange cash for ammo, unlike recent times. No one stocked that caliber around here from what he had seen; not that he looked very hard. It was easy to find online, but if he wasn’t going to make the effort to stop by a gun dealer, he sure wasn’t going to have it shipped to one because California’s laws were asinine.
The state had put enough disincentives into being a gun owner that Stackhouse had never gone beyond buying his own Remington shotgun fifteen years ago. For a guy who went shooting only on camping trips or when he had to qualify, the hoops the state made him jump through were a major turn-off. Why bother? Guns were just a minor interest to him and more trouble than they were worth. What he owned had been enough for him. Until now.
The talk in the briefing room last night had been chilling. One of the deputies, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, talked about the horrors of having grown up during the siege of Sarajevo. Stackhouse was awestruck by how casually the deputy talked about catching rats to eat and his father’s multiple gun battles in the ruins. As he reflected on the night’s conversation in the morning, the sergeant had no idea that at headquarters they were discussing the same urban warfare. He should have been better prepared.
404 in Progress
Palmer was ambivalent about Dispatch being back on the air. He had enjoyed last night’s freedom of not having to constantly tell someone where you were or what you were doing. The one benefit to him now was that they had no way of putting out calls. It was entirely up to the deputies in the field to locate trouble and handle it. Aside from the fact that he was now living through the end of the world, his morning was awful, fueled entirely by bad coffee and warm energy drinks. It was eleven o’clock and the out-of-body feeling from sleep deprivation was only just going away. He and his partner Sean Sibley had been cut loose at just before midnight, which worked out to about four hours of actual sleep.
Today Palmer was partnered up with a jail deputy he had never heard of before, Finnegan. The kid looked far greener than the two years on the job he claimed. Without any patrol training, David hoped that his partner’s academy lessons still came to mind. The boot, Palmer couldn’t think of him as a peer yet, did have excellent command presence, which was reassuring. As the world’s problem solvers, folks tended to listen to what the deputies had to say as the uniform and badge still carried weight when presented correctly.
Everywhere they went, someone had a generator running. Otherwise it was a quiet morning. Most of the gas stations were closed. One independent station was using a clever setup involving a two-handed flywheel fluid pump to draw the gas from the open filling port and into 55-gallon drums for hand dispensing with a smaller manual pump. The county engineers, by contrast, had managed to get the generators working overnight and rewired to near-antique pumps with analog dials. Palmer wondered how long the gas supply would hold out.
“Let’s take a swing up by Ralphs.”
Finnegan nodded his assent. He didn’t have any better suggestions.
Rounding the corner, they saw the entrance off of Victoria Ave was mobbed. First, the traffic light was out and that created a nightmare all its own. Palmer turned off and went in the backway. Even then the deputies had to park and walk because of the traffic jam. As he suspected, the parking lot was full, and every length of curb taken up as well. Cars circled hopelessly and the more panicked drivers simply abandoned their cars wherever it was convenient and went inside.
“Should we try sorting that out?” Finnegan asked.
“There is no sorting that out.”
Groups of ten shoppers were being let in at a time. It wasn’t a one-out, one-in affair, but Palmer’s take was that the staff was letting in groups when the line of agitated customers started to get unruly. Two very large employees were yelling at three men who tried to shove their way into the store, and it was getting physical. Palmer and Finnegan charged over to assist.
“Back of the line!” Palmer yelled.
“Who the—,” one started to say before he realized it was a cop.
“Back of the line, all three of you. If there are any problems, I’ll trespass all you and that’ll be the end of it.”
The men glared at the deputies but meekly walked to the end of the line.
“I’m so glad to see you guys,” an employee said.
“Where’s the city police?
“They drove by early this morning and we haven’t seen them since. We had someone walk over to the station for help, but they haven’t come back yet.”
Palmer knew most of the Ventura officers were busy on the lower-rent parts of town, but they ought to have had at least one man here.
“Well, we’ll stick around and see what we can do.”
What the inside of the store looked like blew the deputies’ minds. Aisles were filled with carts on both sides and for the entire length. Carts were constantly crashing into each other. The collisions were so common no one said anything about it. Anything and everything was
winding up in carts. People were shoving each other out of the way to grab items and others were taking things from other’s carts. The floor was sticky from products that had fallen and been trampled. Every section had been picked over, leaving only the most unappetizing and damaged items on the shelves.
Checkers were looking at items, comparing it against a printed reference book, doing the math on calculators and scratch pads. Signs were plastered everywhere stating “Cash Only.” As they walked down the front of the store to the where the manager was arguing with someone, they overheard bits of conversations.
“Well, we can put back some of your items,” a male checker said.
“I’ve only got $43. Can I show you my tits for the difference? It’s only like $20.” The woman was almost middle aged but was still attractive enough that such a thing was a viable option.
Palmer and Finnegan looked at each other and exchanged a look that was all too common for cops. Did you hear that? I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that if you play along.
“Well that was disturbing.”
The desperate woman arguing decided to give it up and left when the deputies came over.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” the manager said. “Not even the day before Thanksgiving is it this bad.”
“What’s with all the carts up here?” Finnegan asked, referring to half a dozen carts filled with all sorts of food, lined up in front of the registers.
“For re-shelving. Things people can’t afford because they don’t have enough cash. It’s total anarchy right now. It’s only the Mexicans like me and old people that carry cash. Everyone else has a debit card. That lady who was just yelling at me wanted me to take down her debit card numbers and run it later.” He shook his head. “They just don’t get it.”