Hard Favored Rage

by Don Shift

  Andres leaned back in his seat. “It’s not that. I just don’t like the idea of killing people. Not against it, but I don’t like it.”

  “It’s gonna be worth it, you’ll see. This time, two, three years from now, we’ll be living up in the mountains on a farm. Have our own little village, a couple wives each. We’ll be kings.”

  Pleasant Valley Sunday

  On Sunday morning, Sean stood in the shade near the entrance to a grocery store. For all their big talk, neither of the Sibley boys could explain just why they were going to work except it felt better to go to work than it did to stay home. Their father called it stupid. Sean told him it was cowardly to stay home and damned David for talking to Sean about “all that High Noon BS.” His worry for his sons revealed itself as frustration.

  The store had been pretty well picked over the last two days and burglarized over the night. On his walk through with the manager, Sean saw that the alcohol was gone down to the last can of Bud Light and the frozen microwave foods still filled the freezer cases. Someone did have the sense to clean out all the spoiled meat and dairy, but as a result, the stench from the dumpsters was unbelievable and residents of the neighboring apartments were complaining. The floors were a mess and multicolored footprints led every which way across the tile.

  Many useful things still remained. He supposed that without the riot atmosphere at some of the other stores, like Target for example, people only bought or stole what they immediately recognized as necessary. Items that were still valuable sat on the shelves, like bleach, laundry detergent, soaps, scented candles, household supplies, and sundry items. Things that preppers, or simply the wise, could make use of.

  By now, the manager didn’t care at all about making money for the store. The only reason he even showed up today was simply to protect the property itself. If things did recover, a burnt shell of a grocery store would not help the company or his employment future. There was no point in the grocery business itself because so many people lacked the cash to make a purchase with. Even slashing prices by 50% didn’t help much. Word of the discount spreading did bring customers in from all over the county, resulting in everything edible being bought yesterday. When they closed for business yesterday, the manager let staff collect their pay in whatever they wanted that was left over.

  The Vons manager had invited Sean to help himself and so he did just that. Under typical circumstances, uniformed personnel engaged in looting was tantamount to seeing one’s army throwing down their rifles and running. It was not something the public wanted to see, and once they did, eroded any confidence in any authority that might have remained.

  Sean took some unscented bleach to use for water purification and disinfection. Many people didn’t know that in standard garage temperatures, bleach begins to lose its potency within three to six months. Eventually, even under optimal temperatures, it would chemically degrade into saltwater once the oxygen component of the acidic molecules escaped. The scented candles in the air freshener aisle were overlooked, because while the tea light candles were obvious survival needs, looking for fresh scents wasn’t. Sean took a couple cans of air spray just in case the back-up outhouse became a necessity.

  For personal use, he grabbed some shoe polish and spare laces, all of it. Not likely anyone would be making shoe polish for a long time and it might be nice to look professional from time to time. There wasn’t much that he or his family needed so it was wrong to simply grab whatever he could. His dad had been prepping since the mid-1990s when Y2K was the threat on the horizon and the Northridge earthquake had scared the young father into taking prepping seriously. The family emergency plan was to hunker down and quietly survive the crisis, only relocating to their in-law’s Kern County land if necessary.

  Sean didn’t know why he did it, but he followed orders and reported in on Sunday morning, enduring an ear bending from his wife and father. He had argued that things were not desperate enough to pull the hatch closed and hunker down, so he might as well go out and do some good. It wasn’t like people were roaming the streets trying to eat each other or taking potshots at their neighbors. Not yet anyhow.

  The senior Sibley decided to drop the issue after a few minutes of lively arguing, recognizing that Sean’s desire to help was genuine, the danger low, and that the young man deserved to have his itch to see the elephant scratched. Sean had no intention of getting a black eye like his brother-in-law, so he switched out the slugs in his shotgun for 00 buckshot, regulations be damned.

  One of the citizen patrol volunteers, who also happened to be an amateur radio enthusiast, rolled through the parking lot in his Ford Bronco. They exchanged waves. Many of the volunteers had taken to driving their personal vehicles on patrols around the city looking for people who needed emergency assistance, then using portable radios to call for help. After a few months, he got to know many of the volunteers. These folks would give up their nights and weekends, and sometimes early mornings, simply to guard crime scenes, setup command posts, or walk through farm fields looking for a single spent cartridge case. Sean regretted not getting to know many of them better before he was shipped off to Ojai.

  All that was left to keep any semblance of law enforcement functioning was goodwill; that of the employees and volunteers who show up and the goodwill of the public who still respected the police. In normal times, even a bad police department could maintain control through a monopoly of force. The threat of arrest and jail was a powerful disincentive to crime. Now mutual respect was required. More than that, a basic desire by the public to still have police was a prerequisite unless one wanted to ceaselessly watch their own backs. Law and order were the acceptance of certain rules and a willingness, that even if you broke the rules, you would play within the system. Even in the wild towns the system had its policemen and consequences.

  On the alternative side of the coin, when everyone lost faith in civilization, the basic principles of humanity were as rare as a virgin in a whorehouse. Sean figured that the department brass’s worst fear was of deputies going home and staying there as he himself had contemplated. No cops on the street would send the message that no one would stop criminals or the self-serving from doing what seemed right in their eyes.

  Anarchy would result and the response would be gangs, neighborhood factions, and even racial conflicts. Church had told him the power vacuum in Iraq immediately after Saddam fell is what led to the radical clerics gaining power and the strong men in the Baath party becoming the head of anti-American insurgent groups. On a smaller level, Iraq broke down into its basic tribal structure. Suicide bombs would be unlikely, but urban warfare would be a definite certainty.

  Mr. Sibley was always worried about America fracturing along tense racial and political lines. An economic disaster, nuclear war, or rarer catastrophe like EMP would simply serve as the accelerant to the gasoline fire ready to burn at a moment’s notice. It was what happened in Somalia and in the former Yugoslavia that worried him about how savage and uncivilized former countrymen could be to each other. That was why he had chosen to live on a fortified ranch and invested so much time and money in what was called back then, when he began, survivalism. When the thin veneer of civilized society was stripped away, nothing would be covering up mankind’s proclivity to be cruel to one another.

  Sean wasn’t ready for his father’s world despite his bravado Friday evening. He did not want to be patrolling the perimeter fence in the middle of the night. An empty post-apocalyptic world didn’t interest him. He would rather go to the movies with his wife, go on vacations, and spend evenings drinking beer or wine with friends. No matter of “freedom” from California’s socialist government or Congress was worth not being able to jog unmolested through the city at 4 AM. People were starting to arrive at the store, and he was already working himself into a rage.

  Cadet Jason Verga woke up about noon on Sunday and was still exhausted. The deputies called him ‘The Kid,’ a total misnomer, but then again, nicknames were often appellat
ions that had more to do with what someone wasn’t than what they were. Jason was six feet tall, broad shouldered, and occasionally sported stubble on weekends just to remind everyone that he could, in fact, grow a beard. By virtue of being the youngest (male) employee at East County, he earned his sobriquet. It was never used as an insult, only as a gentle, joshing around kind of call. Like: “Hey Kid, somebody made a mess in the back of my unit. Guess who gets to clean it up?”

  Most people had no idea what exactly a cadet was. They were theoretically the intern equivalent of a deputy, but the cadets became whatever they needed to be at the moment. Political correctness and liability concerns had toned it down over the years, but as one deputy said to Verga, “you’re wearing the uniform, so you’ll make do in a pinch.”

  When Verga was detailed by Captain Owens to collect supplies, he thought that he was saved from having to direct traffic or assist with one of the two fatals that afternoon. Instead, he spent most of the night and well into the morning commandeering the strangest collection of things imaginable. When the supplies had been gathered, he was put to work setting up the command post and running power cords from the generator every which way.

  At some point, he fell asleep on the floor beneath his desk until someone rousted him at dawn to eat a breakfast cooked by the fire department’s emergency catering company. That was the last decent meal he had in ages. The rest of the day had been typical “bitch work.” Part of what that meant was digging a latrine to replace the toilets once water pressure failed. He and the one remaining inmate worker, a felony prison kickback who refused to leave the station since his family no longer lived in Ventura County, dug the toilet pits by hand at a flat spot across from the helipad.

  The one thing he didn’t do was complain. For all his hard work, he did get one small courtesy and that was to get Sunday and part of Monday off while the rest of the traffic bureau was called in.

  He got back to the house he rented with several other college students late last night. He didn’t bother looking at the time before he turned in. Jason woke up at noon to hear his roommate Ted Hayashi banging things around.

  “What’s with all the noise?” Jason yelled.

  “Sorry princess, didn’t mean to wake you up. I’m packing up and heading to my parents.”

  Ted was from San Jose, five hours north, and went to school at California Lutheran University. “Did everyone else leave? I know Kenny said he was going back to Bakersfield.”

  “Yeah, Kenny left yesterday afternoon and Mikey took off this morning before me. Sorry about the rent, dude.”

  Jason shrugged. “I don’t think Mikey’s parents are going to come down here and ask me for the $2,400.”

  “Guess you’re right. Are you going to stay?”

  “It’s not like I can get on a plane to Newark now.” Jason felt that moving to California for college had been a mixed blessing. On one hand, the geography and his job gave him chances he wouldn’t have had he chosen South Jersey. On the other he missed his mom, but not moving into Uncle Tony’s crowded cabin in the Poconos in this mess.

  “True. Bummer. Well, we left most of the food for you. And a beer.”

  “One beer?”

  “Yeah, we drank all the rest Friday night and Saturday. Sorry. We ate all the frozen food. And Mikey got a great deal from Trader Joe’s on these organic steaks the other day. He got ten of them for a buck each, so we cooked them up with the last of the charcoal.”

  “Well thanks for leaving me charcoal. I hope your discount meat doesn’t kill you. Have fun crapping your pants on the way up to San Jose.”

  Ted laughed. “Wish we could have stayed. I enjoyed living with you guys. Hopefully we’ll be back together in a few weeks once they get the power back on.”

  “Yeah,” was all Jason said.

  They shook hands and Ted put the last things in his car. “By the way, the gas station on the corner of Moorpark is selling gas now. They’ve got this pump thing, like one of those dynamite detonators with the T-handle from the Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Well, catch you on the flip side, bro.”

  Ted started his car, backed out of the garage, and disappeared down the street. Jason went inside and brushed his teeth under the anemic flow of cold water, then got dressed. His first act of preparedness was to get a tube of superglue and glue the plastic drain cover down in the bathtub. He used a piece of flexible rubber to cover the overflow drain. Filled to capacity, the tub would hold 60 gallons.

  A small dribble poured out of the cold tap. Jason sighed and turned the knob to the hot side and got a similar trickle. Of course, the other three would have used up whatever was left in the hot water heater. Suddenly he had an idea and grabbed the two-gallon bucket from under the bathroom sink and dumped the cleaning supplies on the floor. There was another one just like it under the kitchen sink. Buckets in hand, Jason walked out the front door and down the walkway to the community pool. He dunked them in the water and walked back to the house where he emptied them into the tub.

  Four gallons of water looked pitiful. Jason turned and walked out the door again, filled up, and walked back. It wasn’t difficult, but to keep the water from sloshing around and spilling out, Jason had to hold the buckets far from his body. It was something that he would quickly grow tired of. On his third trip out the door, Jason checked his watch. A little over two minutes one way. Figure about one minute to fill up and to pour and he was looking at a round trip of five minutes. It would take 15 to 20 trips to fill up the tub, which amounted to over an hour of walking.

  Jason sighed again and resigned himself to the drudgery. He needed the water badly. His only reserve was a five-gallon jug dropped off by the city when a nearby water main broke a couple months ago. His roommates had taken all the individual bottles of water. In all his life, he never imagined the water wouldn’t flow. He figured he would need about two and a half gallons a day. One to drink (Jason felt the two to three-quart recommendation wasn’t enough in the summer heat), one to clean with, and half a gallon to cook with.

  60 gallons in the tub would give him about 24 days of water, not accounting for loss to evaporation. Except that pool water was not safe to drink. He knew tap water left the treatment plant at about one to one-point-five parts per million of chlorine. Swimming pools ran up to three to five PPM or even higher. Jason figured that in his complex, it was higher. After taking care of his family’s above ground pool each summer, he knew that the pH level was around seven and safe, but the chlorine was kept from evaporating with a stabilizer known as cyanuric acid, which comes from cyanide. Not to mention all the various germs that were floating in the water from everyone in the neighborhood using the pool.

  Using one gallon to wash with an another to help the toilet function was going to last for thirty days. Drinking it would be a last resort and drinking water would be a serious problem. Two more days with the jug and the nine gallons of bottled water (three 24-packs of 16oz bottles) brought him to five days of drinking water. Well, more like a week, if he counted the jug of water and warm sodas in the fridge. He would have to buy or find more water, as in ten cases of bottled water minimum. Jason let out a rare curse. A month, just a month’s worth of clean water is all I want.

  Lost in thought, Jason tripped and fell face down on his doorstep. He was more upset about spilling the water on his legs than he was about smacking his chest on the ground. His soaked shoes squeaked on his way back to the pool to refill. Just fifteen more minutes of this, he thought.

  A shout interrupted Jason’s reverie. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” It was the short, fat HOA president who normally spent his days patrolling the community on a golf cart. Today he was hobbling along on a cane.

  “I’m filling up my tub with water.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  Jason shrugged. “I guess I can.”

  “You need to knock it off, now!”

  Jason thought for a momen
t. “Sorry, but I need the water and I’m not aware of any HOA regulation that says I can’t do this.” He dipped his buckets in, stood up, and walked out the gate.

  The president wobbled aggressively towards Jason now that they were no longer separated by the pool enclosure. “I told you to stop! That water belongs in the pool. We’ll give you a citation!”

  This is absurd, Jason thought. Does this guy even realize the magnitude of what’s happening? Probably not. As the short, angry man crossed the plaza, Jason just assumed that in addition to his regular role as regulator of all things unimportant, the man was just frightened and didn’t know how to react. He just needed someone to calmly explain what was going on and why saving pool water was suddenly going to become very important.

  Jason didn’t have a chance to explain. The president grabbed for a bucket and ended up spilling it all over the ground. Taking a step back, Jason heaved the other bucket at the man and drenched him from head to toe. That took the fire out of him. Sopping wet, the man’s mouth flopped like a fish out of water. Jason bent over and picked up the buckets.

  “Look, something really bad happened. I doubt the power or the water will come back on anytime soon. No one likes you and now no one gives a crap about whatever little power you think you have. I’m filling up my tub with water. Once I’m done, I’ll stop.” He took a step toward the now petrified petty busybody. “Don’t get in my way.” The remaining trips went without incident, although he was certain that the president was busy writing a very strongly worded letter of protest.

  Being a college student, Jason didn’t keep much in the way of disaster supplies. There was a pre-packaged bucket with 12 days’ worth of food (at his mother’s insistence for living in earthquake country), some of his dehydrated backpacking food, and what he had in his pantry.