by Don Shift
The mandatory post-shooting week leave was out of the question.
“No, just didn’t want to be a douchebag to the next guy.”
The next guy… Villareal thought. It amazed him how faithful Palmer was and he felt fortunate to command men of that caliber.
“Don’t we have a tanker hidden somewhere?”
Villareal shook his head again. “I’m afraid that’s it. All the gas is gone. There’s a reason we put just you out today.” The relief dispatcher had not shown up and there were no resources to try and fetch her. The one who remained was trying to fight a losing battle against fatigue.
“So…”
It was a question that begged not to be asked. The answer was almost inconceivable to the acting sheriff and veteran deputy. Villareal had been reflecting on it all morning. The jails were literally empty. The last person hauled in overnight for whatever crime had been released simply because there was no one to supervise him.
“It’s every man for himself now.” The last words uttered by the captain of a sinking ship.
Villareal had thought of everything that could be done to fix the situation, but modern law enforcement had broken down. Without phones, police could not be called to where they were needed. Without gas, police could not patrol or even get to work. Without food, they could not function, without police patrolling the streets and able to respond to trouble, deputies and officers could not leave their families alone. And for many, without any form of compensation or benefits, they had no reason to serve any longer. Honor cannot fill bellies.
“So what do we do then?”
The sheriff shrugged. “Well, the idea of creating local courts and jails was nice, but we don’t have the infrastructure anymore. You can’t just go back to doing things the way they did in the 1800s. Even then, they had an infrastructure, no matter if it was old fashioned. We don’t even have horses. Even if we did, we have too much territory to police it effectively. Way back when, everything was smaller and slower, someone could gallop for help and summon a posse to round up the bad guy. What are people going to do now? Walk miles to the station after they’ve been robbed, if they get here in one piece? How has word of mouth policing been working for you?”
“I’ve been chasing rumors and cold calls all over the county.”
“That’s it. By the time the information gets to you, it’s too late. Just imagine what’s going on that we never hear about!” The smoke and volleys of gunfire that occasionally punctuated the air were just the tip of the iceberg. “Say we catch someone; how do we house them? How do we try them? How do we punish them? Not like I can ask the farmer’s wife to bring food to the jail and water the inmates with the pump in the yard. No way we could impanel a jury, much less house and supervise the guy for punishment.”
“So I guess this is it, then?”
“You’re welcome at Todd Road, plenty of room.” He explained that last night some deputies had conceived an idea to hastily convert the remote jail, surrounded by farmland, into a miniature fortress to house about a third of the department and their families. The plan was to hunker down until the worst of the unrest passed, then they would have a trained police force and community to begin restoring some sort of order. Like a fort on the frontier, Villareal explained.
“Sounds like a prime target to overrun, sir.”
“Don’t you know it.”
“So what are you going to do? Today, I mean.”
Villareal drummed his fingers on the desk a moment before answering. “Go home, when I get up the nerve to lock the doors.”
Wisely, Villareal had the sense to shut down the jails early. LA County wasted massive manpower trying to book and house people, all the while, within the first 24 hours, prison guards across the state gunned down their worst inmates. And all because no one thought to take the threat of EMP or a grid-down disaster seriously.
Palmer looked around the office. Not much of value in here anymore. Already the heritage items, the extra badges, and vital paper records were locked away in a very secure vault somewhere. No one would want penal codes, computer manuals, or the office appliances. The guns, ammo, and anything of real police utility went home with the deputies. It wouldn’t be like in Iraq when people came in to steal furniture, salvage copper wiring, and strip the carpets. Well, maybe the copper wiring.
Mid-September
What Millions Can Buy
The Hidalgo Ranch was an empire unto itself. As Mr. Sibley rode his horse Bilbo through the fields, the house on the hill that was his destination stayed visible the whole time. Its owner was the largest grower in the county. Everyone in the Southwest knew the name that the magnate had slapped on produce products that included baby carrots, green onions, and kale packaged and distributed from his shipping complex next to the railroad tracks.
The two had met years earlier, before Sibley had moved to Somis, when a detective TV show was filming a murder at the ranch. Sibley was the firearms prop master and got to talking with Alejandro Hidalgo. Hidalgo was impressed with the former SEAL’s resume and equally impressed with his gun collection. The friendship developed easily from there.
The main ranch property ran to the state highway and was surrounded by a picturesque white fence. The strawberry stand near the main driveway looked abandoned, but it wasn’t. Sibley stopped in front of it and called out his friend’s name. He heard a creak of hinges as a viewing port was lifted up.
“Go ahead, sir,” said a voice from inside.
“Thank you.”
Sibley dismounted and opened the gate that unlocked with an electric click. Solar panels covered the top of the strawberry stand to power the gate, cameras, and sophisticated sensors. After the EMP, several days into repairing his own solar array, Hidalgo’s electrician came to help Sibley. The ranch had taken three men four sixteen-hour days to repair every damaged charge controller, burnt out circuit breaker, fried surge protector, and dead transformer.
It never ceased to amaze him what a five hundred-million-dollar net worth could buy. The Sibleys’ preparations had been expensive enough and far beyond the ability of most homeowners. For each of the men, it had taken them thirty years to build up their businesses and land to the state they were in now. All that toil and money because the government refused to pay the cost of two aircraft carriers to harden the grid and setup a backup plan. It made him angry to think about.
Behind the first windbreak of trees, a few field hands worked to harvest corn by hand. Two armed men stood on look out over the pickers as children ran in between the rows of stalks laughing and playing. One of the men was a deputy that Sibley recognized. Further up, Mr. Hidalgo’s younger cousin passed by on a horse.
“Morning Kyle.”
“Good to see you Gus.”
“Alex is in his garage. I’ll be seeing you.”
The garage was shaped like a large barn but held cars instead of horses. It was really just one very large man cave. Alex Hidalgo was under the hood tinkering with the engine of a forest green 1957 Chevy 6500 flatbed heavy-duty truck. For many years, it had hauled Sean and Tyler’s Boy Scout troop down the Christmas parade route.
“I guess I should have gotten this in diesel,” Hidalgo said without looking up.
“You should have moved to New Zealand.”
“The gun laws are even worse than here.” Hidalgo pulled his head out and stepped off his work platform to shake hands. “Do you have them?”
“Right here.” Sibley held up a bag containing half a dozen rifle suppressors. Making them prior to the EMP would have been a state felony and a federal one. Both men thought it was asinine that a device not very different than the mufflers that were under each vehicle in the garage were so highly regulated. Viewed as tools of assassins, “silencers” had been demonized in the 1930s during the bootlegger and mafia machine gun scare.
In exchange for the suppressors, Hidalgo had promised 100 gallons of diesel fuel each. Based on labor alone, it was a fair trade given the inability to go int
o town and stop off at a gas station.
The body of the suppressors were nothing more than two pieces of titanium sheet bent and welded into a tube. Inside, a set of baffles slowed and helped trap the hot, high pressure propulsion gases that “pop” out of a gun barrel behind the bullet. The space between the baffles gave the gas room to expand and cool before it trickled out of the front of the “can.” For a rifle bullet, all one really heard was the supersonic crack. Sibley always explained a regular gun shot as a loud, echoing fart, compared to a long, slow, and silent suppressed one.
Making the baffles was the hard and the illegal part, so it was necessary to make them only after the EMP. He did have several legal suppressors for his movie business, but those required the almost impossible to obtain Dangerous Weapon Permits from Sacramento. To make these, he had to first fix all the electrical problems the energy pulse had caused. His solar array was unable to provide enough power to run the machines, so Sibley fired up his large diesel generator.
It took about an hour for his lathe to cut the sections of titanium stock into sections that, if viewed from the side, resembled the letter K. Through the center of each he drilled a hole just larger than the 5.56mm bullet (actually 5.7mm in diameter) to pass through. Ten of them made up each suppressor. To facilitate cleaning, he threaded each end of the suppressor body and screwed on an end cap he machined, staking the metal by driving a very hard and small chisel tip to bend metal across the seam to keep them from unscrewing themselves.
“I see that you have some deputies working for you.”
“I do. The police station on the other side of the hill was thick with them.” Hidalgo had his own private security force the size of a US Army platoon. He had approached and recruited veterans and cops from the area post-EMP to supplement his two full-time bodyguards. Had it been some other disaster, he would have hired a security contracting company like many businesses and wealthy people did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Alex Hidalgo was not going to take a security shift like Sibley did. In that respect, the two men were very different.
“I see you still have my Nomad.” Sibley sold his restored 1955 Chevy wagon to Hidalgo in order to help defray the costs of his solar array. Painful at the time, especially to Mrs. Sibley who drove the car the most, it was a wise investment.
Hidalgo waved at the cars. “I should have bred horses. I tried to buy some more, but all the local stables are empty, at least for sales. Trade you your Nomad and anything else for your horse.”
“No thanks. Why are you working on that truck anyway? Don’t you have diesels?”
“I do, but I’d like to conserve the diesel fuel. I have plenty of gas that’s getting stale. Unfortunately, someone broke into my distribution center and siphoned off nearly two thousand gallons of diesel.”
“You didn’t guard it?”
He shook his head. “It’s an unmarked tank. Must have been someone with inside knowledge.”
“I hope you can trust your security force.”
Hidalgo turned back towards his truck. “I don’t have any choice.”
Sibley was fortunate that his guests were all family or close equivalents. He was going to need more men.
Huerta stepped out of his Humvee and surveyed the terrain. Foothills rose up around him on three sides and a large mountain on the fourth. Nestled in a flat spot on a creek sat Thomas Aquinas College, a private Catholic liberal arts university halfway between Ojai and Santa Paula. The campus was a mix of semi-classic architecture built in the Spanish style. It was a grand place, far more impressive than the bland style of his alma mater. A priest in his cassock met him on the grass.
“I’m Father Donnelly, good of you to come, Major.”
They shook hands.
“It’s my pleasure, Father. Do you hold mass every morning?”
“It depends on the day’s activities. There is a lot that needs to be done.”
Huerta looked around. Some students were wheeling a wheelbarrow in the distance.
“Starting a garden?”
“Oh yes. One of the faculty members had a lot of seeds. We’re putting it in down by the creek to make irrigation easier. President Wisniewski is actually out trying to find some materials to help build the system. He’s asked me to meet with you.”
Sergeant Major Burke had come up the canyon with Major Huerta. Burke didn’t like the lay of the land. For a campus or a grid-down survival compound, the relative isolation and near-perennial water source was ideal, but the location was not good for defense. To a soldier’s eye, the terrain was to an attacker’s advantage. There was small ridge overlooking the dorms not 100 yards away. The hills all around were perfect for a mortar team to setup and bomb the campus shielded from the Strykers’ guns. Enemies could advance unseen through the creek to the north. Even though they were five miles from Santa Paula and the freeway, a two-lane state highway ran immediately to the west. Burke wondered if Huerta would let them demolish the bridges.
Huerta was aware of the tactical disadvantages of the campus. He had been in Afghanistan for two cumulative years and was at FOB Keating, where Clint Romesha was awarded his Medal of Honor, a few months before the base was overrun. Anarchy aside, California was not Nuristan Province and even the worst-of-the-worst gang members and criminals did not have mortars and RPGs. Drinking water and room to grow food was what Huerta was interested in.
The morning after the ambush at Veteran’s Park, a general withdrawal from public order duties was given by the brigadier general in charge of Task Force LA. The deliberate, coordinated attacks by cartel-affiliated gangs was too much and pushed several Guard units to the point of mutiny. To stop the desertions, the general permitted the units to withdraw to more protective locations and take their families with them.
Charlie Company saw many departures that morning. Huerta let the men go home to their families. The regular troops, all far from home with no hope of returning, stayed with the major, as did a few of the Guardsmen with no close relations. Those who said they would come back were to meet at Santa Paula Airport in Ventura County. The Army wanted an airbase to lift in supplies outside of the LA basin, but the Navy would not share Point Mugu.
Some pencil pusher with bad maps and poor satellite imagery thought that the small, general use airport would be a great location. Unlike the larger airports in Camarillo and Oxnard a few miles away, Santa Paula’s field was supposedly “concealed” from the view of passing cars on the freeway by buildings. The Santa Clara River would supply water. The many hangers could be converted to sheltered parking for the Strykers and housing for the soldiers. The airport would have fuel for the Strykers to burn.
It was all foolish non-sense. Yes, the other two airports in the county were wide open to view, but there were several great vantage points in Santa Paula to watch helicopters come and go, if any were still flying. To Huerta, it seemed like the officer who thought this up never imagined someone could peek their head above a fence to see the other side. The river was also bone dry this time of year and either held an unusable trickle in winter or a turbulent, muddy, and debris-filled flood. Being an airport for small private planes that burned gasoline, the diesel-like jet fuel was unavailable.
But orders were orders and a resupply convoy eventually met them there.
Fate smiled upon the soldiers. The artillerymen from Bravo Battery of the 143rd Artillery in Ventura had been detailed to round out the diminished Charlie Company. They brought along their families, one whose wife was the daughter of the president of Thomas Aquinas College. The college had plenty of room in the dorms, as only a handful of students had arrived early for the fall semester. It was a much better location than a hot airport on the bank of a dry river. The invitation to take up garrison at the college was irresistible.
Living with Mom and Dad
Nights at the Palmer house were split with David and his father keeping watch through half the night. During the day, while the women were awake and the neighbors were up, the men napp
ed. To get some sleep through the hot days, David tied a section of torn-up tablecloth around his head as a substitute eyeshade as he made the best of the breezes in a hammock. His father didn’t mind the heat. His naps were constantly interrupted by gunfire, yelling, and the countless neighbors his mother let dip water out of their pool.
He was at a loss for why his father insisted on staying at their house instead of moving out to the Sibleys’ as his sister Carlie, Sean’s wife, had arranged. Mr. Sibley was practically begging for more bodies to help guard the place. The room-sized garden here was no match for the multi-acre plot that was the family’s personal garden. The creature comforts of a ceiling fan and a properly insulated house would be delightful. Developers in the ‘70s thought stucco and sheetrock was enough insulation in Southern California.
Yesterday had been a fiasco. David volunteered to be part of the local police guard at the Saticoy well. Located right on the state highway, it seemed like everybody who needed water in the state was driving by. Towards sunset, at the end of his shift, two pickup trucks loaded with armed men pulled up and started shooting. A SWAT officer fired tear gas through the windshields of each truck while the other three cops returned fire.
Two civilians had been hit and three men who had been shot fell out of the beds and were left for dead. None of the officers or David were hurt. All over the county, things like that were being tried. Idiots who wanted to trade water for food, fuel, or sex were challenging the cops who secured the wells. The inmate fire camp at the Youth Authority juvenile prison was running tankers full of water, operated by inmate firefighters who volunteered to stay at the camp, to those areas not served by wells.
Brooke and his parents disapproved of David going out on duty. He reasoned that if he couldn’t go on patrol because there was no more gas, then he would do something for public safety. A lot of other cops felt the same way, and just as unprepared as the rest of society, felt it was a great way to stay alive. The well in Saticoy was slowly turning into a little armed camp as the golf course filled up with trailers, RVs, and fifth wheels. Since police patrols had disintegrated, the quickest way to find a cop was to find drinking water.