Neighborhood Watch: After the EMP

by EE Isherwood

  “Well, thanks for coming here with my husband. This is too crazy to even believe…”

  Several boys ran past us, weaving between parked cars with their heads crouched low, as if someone were shooting at them, though I heard no shots.

  I kept my head swiveling for threats, but I wanted to keep the conversation light.

  “What do you do for a living, Melanie?” I asked.

  “I do IT support for a fishing company in downtown Fort Myers, like light programming and server management. Basically I turn stuff off and then turn them back on again. Whatever it takes to keep things running.”

  “I guess it all came crashing down when the EMP went off?” I asked.

  She shrugged in a way which seemed unencumbered by guilt. “Hell if I know. I wasn’t there. I ducked out for an early lunch and was doing some shopping down at the Pine Island stores. When the power went out, the stores went dark, but it was kind of fun for the shoppers. There were skylights in my store, and the mood turned festive for a while, at least until people came inside and said the cars were all dead…”

  Melanie was silent for a short time.

  “You alright?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she answered right away. “I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time. I kept dropping things in my cart thinking the world outside was humming right along. I should have ditched the store and run toward the school.”

  “It’s okay, honey,” Luke said, putting his hand on her arm. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m sure I would have done the same thing in your position. I’m only here because Frank figured out the problem minutes after it happened and began organizing about ten seconds later. He helped Penny, the woman who lives next to Frank, get her daughter from daycare.”

  “Then I owe you even more thanks,” Melanie remarked. “For keeping our home safe during this catastrophe. It took me about an hour to walk to the school from where I was. Each street I passed made me think worse and worse things about our own home. I never dreamed it would be this big.”

  “That’s what she said!” Tyler interjected.

  “Ty, not now.” Luke’s stare was ice-cold.

  I gave the kid a reappraising look, like he had good taste in humor. I’d already passed on a similar joke earlier in the day. My job was too serious to be joking around like I normally would, but I didn’t mind someone else rising to the task.

  “Right before a dark journey is the perfect time,” Tyler replied, still giggling at his own joke.

  Rainey slapped him on the shoulder. “Who says it’s going to be dark?”

  Before he could reply, his sister kept talking.

  “There’s my car!”

  We all congregated around Rainey’s white sedan, which was a plain-looking Chevy car I couldn’t immediately identify. She’d left her door unlocked, so she got right in.

  “Do you think there’s anything of value in her car?” Luke asked me. “Besides her personal stuff?”

  “It depends,” I replied. “Most cars aren’t going to have much in the way of survival value, at least at first. Later, we could siphon the gas for heating, running generators, or whatever. Her car probably has a spare tire and a tire iron, but those are found in almost every car. We could get ten of them back on our street. The tire iron might make a primitive club if we didn’t already have more serious firepower.”

  “I need a weapon,” Tyler said with no humor.

  “What?” his father replied.

  “A weapon. You two have guns and a bat. Levar had those cool pistols on his belt.” He pointed to the shotgun in the trailer. “I was kind of joking before, but I really do want one of those. I want to defend mom…”

  “And what about me?” Rainey asked from inside her car.

  “I guess you, too.” Tyler chuckled.

  “You want him to have the hammer?” I asked Luke.

  The man shook his head.

  “But Dad!” the boy complained.

  Luke spoke quietly to his son. “Tyler, I promise you the second I see a threat out here, I’ll give you a weapon. For now, on this nice little walk, just stay close and out of trouble, okay? Can you do that?”

  Tyler didn’t seem to like it, but he nodded anyway.

  Rainey came out of her car holding a pair of blue sneakers, all smiles.

  “We can go,” she declared.

  “Why don’t you put them in the trailer,” I suggested.

  Rainey opened the flap of the trailer and tossed in the shoes. The young girl visibly recoiled at the sight of the shotguns, as if they were a pair of snakes about to bite her. After a flutter of indecision, she slapped the plastic lid shut again.

  I took a moment and peeked into her car to see if there was anything useful being left behind. Other than a Christmas tree air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror, her ride didn’t seem to have any other personal touches. It made it easy to see there was nothing of value.

  “Is there anything in the trunk?” I asked.

  “Nope. During running season I keep a bag with nutrition and hydration bottles, which would have been awesome for a walk home, but there’s nothing back there now.”

  “If the season’s over, why do you still have the shoes?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “I do long distance for track, so I have to put on some miles almost every day. They aren’t long, though, so I don’t need all my extras.”

  I didn’t understand the impulse to run voluntarily, but I immediately sensed how much she was invested in the sport. If the expensive-looking running shoes were paired with her zero-percent-body-fat figure, I expected she could run lots of miles.

  Her appearance made me realize there might be an option I hadn’t considered. She and Tyler both dressed like athletes as did their parents.

  “Do you all run?” I asked. “Can you run while we bike?”

  “Hell, no!” Tyler said before anyone else could reply. “Well, the girls do, but I don’t. I’m more of a fan of simulated running, like in role-playing games, you know?”

  I wanted to ask why he was dressed in sporty gear if he hated exercise, but his sister replied immediately.

  “You should have trained in the real world,” Rainey suggested. “If you were able to run, we could get home in less than an hour. As it is, with your twenty-minute-mile walking pace, we’ll be out here for almost two.”

  “I could ride in the trailer,” Tyler said with a cheesy smile.

  “For the millionth time, you’re not riding back there,” Luke replied. “The trailer will break under your weight.”

  “Mom and I could run home,” Rainey suggested. “We both have running shoes. Someone can stay back with slow-poke here.” She gestured to her brother.

  “No,” Luke and I said at the same time.

  I deferred to him.

  “We’re all sticking together for protection,” Luke continued. “That includes you, young lady.”

  Both his kids seemed strong-willed and ready to spring into action, no matter how crazy the idea. I was shocked at how composed Luke and Melanie were in dealing with them, but I figured that calm had come after years of torture.

  Luke turned to me.

  “I don’t run much anymore, Frank. I twisted a knee a few years back, and it hasn’t been right ever since. It’s why I ride bikes now. Much easier on the knees.”

  “But Frank said there wasn’t anything to worry about out here.” Rainey looked in a circle around us.

  “That’s true,” Luke admitted, “but it’s always good to stick together, alright? I want you and your mother where we can all help each other.”

  “Fine,” the girl agreed with a heavy sigh.

  With two bikes and five people, I was sure there was a combination which would get us home faster than walking. We could get two people on a bike, if necessary, and have the fastest runner go on foot. However, I reminded myself we could help more than just Luke’s kids on the way home.

  “This way,” I said, leading them toward the exit of
the parking lot. The whole family followed me as if I was the mother duck.

  We walked a couple of rows before I noticed two young women standing next to a mini-van. One of the girls had found a brick and held it against the glass of the door, as if sizing up how she was going to throw it.

  “Hey, do you have the keys?” I asked on a whim.

  “I do,” the redheaded girl replied, “but it doesn’t open the doors.”

  “There should be a metal key inside the plastic fob. You slide it out and it lets you open the door when the battery is dead.” Since I worked in the transportation industry, I’d seen almost everything with broken-down cars and trucks over the years, so I knew those fobs inside and out. Not only did the plastic housing usually have a hidden metal key to open the outside door, they also had the ability to start a car by pressing them against the start button if their little battery died. These were tricks most drivers never needed, thus they never knew existed.

  The other girl, who appeared to be a twin of the one holding the brick, pulled out a big bundle of keys and fiddled with the fob. After a few seconds, she held up the metal key as if she’d discovered a diamond. “You were right, mister! Thanks.”

  “My pleasure.” I waved and then turned to my friends, who were giving me weird looks. “What?”

  “You just have to help people, don’t you?” Luke spoke in a friendly way, as if amused to know me.

  “Glass is expensive to replace,” I replied. “I saw what she was about to do and probably saved her a few hundred dollars. It only cost me a few seconds of time.”

  “Those two are airheads,” Tyler said under his breath.

  “You know them?” his mother asked.

  “Yeah, they’re in my class. I try to avoid them because they’re the founding members of the anime club, and they like dressing up as characters from weird sci-fi shows.”

  Rainey snorted. “That’s the stuff you like, dork!”

  “But I’m not in a stupid club,” he shot back. “I’m a free agent.”

  “Okay,” I interrupted and realized Tyler might be farther from being an athlete than I could have anticipated. “Let’s just keep walking. We’re not even off the lot yet, and we’ve got those six miles ahead of us.”

  Once we cleared the school grounds, the people thinned out. Students lived in every direction from the school, and columns of walkers filed off toward their homes. Our way, west, seemed to have the most people walking in the same direction. Since we’d managed to get out first, we were almost at the front of the stream, as I’d planned.

  We hadn’t made it far on the main road before I heard a deep growl and the deliberate engine revving of a driver with a lead foot.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  Most kids halted and turned around. The school was perhaps a quarter of a mile behind us, and it was evident the vehicle in question was back there.

  “It’s got to be an old car, right?” Luke asked.

  “Yeah, as a simple rule of thumb, cars built earlier than about 1980 will start for sure. They didn’t have all the fancy computer crap in their engines, so they’re unaffected by the EMP.” I listened for a few seconds as the car seemed to move.

  “There it is!” Tyler pointed.

  A perfectly restored yellow 1972 Ford Mustang Mach 1 sped to the edge of the lot, nosed up to the street, then the driver roasted the tires as he made the left turn.

  “Out of the way!” I cried out, though everyone was already running into the grass.

  The monster car rumbled toward us. A teen boy was at the wheel, his attention on the road. A much less attentive wild-haired blonde girl sat in the passenger seat. She leaned toward the window and laughed as if not quite able to fight the G-force of acceleration. I only had a few moments to make my observations of the pair, however, since the big-block engine soon sent them past us in a canary yellow streak. We were close enough to be buffeted by the air currents as they went by.

  “Geeze,” Tyler exhaled. “That’s Bobby Jablinski. Gearhead. Asshole. Figures he’d have the only working car.”

  In seconds, the Mustang sprinted another quarter of a mile away from us.

  “Well, some people have all the luck,” Melanie said in a calm voice. “A car would be nice, but I’ll be thankful just to have you all safe at home.”

  “Eww, mom,” the boy replied. “I’d rather have the car!”

  We resumed walking for a minute or two before I saw a new crowd of people coming at us from a side street to our south.

  “It looks like the little kids from middle school have been let out,” Tyler said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “There’s a middle school?” I asked.

  “Yep,” Melanie replied. “Our kids went there for three years before coming to the highschool. I’d be worried sick if Ty and Rainey were still that young. I can’t even imagine.”

  “Is there also an elementary school down there?” I inquired.

  “No,” she replied. “It’s a few miles from here.”

  Suddenly, walking with highschool students didn’t seem so bad. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d been stuck walking six miles with children almost as young as Daisy. At the same time, I felt sorry for whatever they were going through at the elementary level.

  “Let’s keep walking,” I said in a calm voice.

  The afternoon sun was relentless as we traveled those first two miles. There were two strips of highway, each with a pair of bubbling-hot asphalt lanes, and they were separated by a twenty-foot strip grass median, so it felt a little like walking on the interstate. Widely-spaced single-family homes dotted the landscape, but the sprawling grass yards and huge gaps between each property made them seem to pass slowly as we trudged along. There wasn’t a hill or slope anywhere along the route, and the trees were far back from the right-of-way, which made the boring walk seem twice as long with double the heat.

  When we finally reached the intersection where we met Bayside Road, the students split into smaller groups. A few continued west, a couple went south, and the largest faction went north, same as us. I finally saw my opportunity to more directly help the walkers.

  “Hey, is anyone going as far as Poseidon Pier?” I called out to the kids arriving at the head of the column.

  I was met with mostly blank stares.

  “The Yucca Reef community?” I clarified.

  More empty faces. They had no idea what I was talking about, though with hundreds of developments up and down the miles of Bayside Road, I realized I was asking a lot of them.

  “It’s the newer subdivision on the right-hand side, surrounded by the trees. The welcome sign has an orange fish that looks like it’s out of Finding Nemo.”

  About twenty hands shot up. I noticed a good number of younger kids from the middle school had caught up to us and were listening to me speak.

  “So are we,” I continued. “Stick with us, okay?”

  The kids gathered around me as I started walking again, though I noticed there were no parents with us anymore. A few had been on the street when we left the school, but they’d already peeled off with their kids. Those students left with me probably lived so far from school their parents had been unable or unwilling to rush there on foot before it let out. Upon reflection, it explained why most of the youngsters joined up with me. They gravitated toward the only adult offering to help get them home.

  We’d walked a short distance before Tyler came up next to me. “Hey, you’re Gandalf, did you know that?”

  “Who’s Gandalf?” I quipped, even though I knew exactly who he was. The kid’s tone made it sound as if he thought he was telling me something extremely important, so I wanted to see where he was going with it.

  “Seriously? You don’t know who he is?”

  “I spent a lot of my life on the road. I didn’t have much time for pop culture. I’ve heard the name, but I’m not sure why you’d say I was him.”

  “You never read the Lord of the Rings?” He gasped. “He’
s a wizard from those books.”

  “Nope,” I fibbed. “I read a lot of books, mind you, but my taste is more toward the end of the world. EMPs. Floods. Asteroids. Those kinds of things.”

  “Hmm. I guess reading about those might be useful these days, but just so you know, Gandalf was the leader of his party as they went to destroy evil. You took over this big group of people like he did. I just hope you don’t end up the same way…”

  “Why, what happened to him?” I got into the spirit of our discussion.

  “He fell into a pit and died.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  Fortunately, his mother popped in. “Tyler, let’s leave Frank alone.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” I replied, “I’m afraid I don’t know what the kids are into these days.”

  “I’m his mother, and I don’t even know,” She chuckled. “Every year it’s something different. Last year he and his friends spent every weekend at our house playing Dungeons & Dragons with dice and paper. This year, they come over and play the same game on the computer.”

  “We’re evolving, mother,” Tyler replied.

  “More like devolving,” Rainey said from behind.

  “Go practice another Tik-Tok dance, idiot!” Tyler yelled.

  I enjoyed listening to them, but we were far from home. “Hey, guys, let’s try to keep it quiet for a while. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves any more than we already are.”

  Someone was bound to notice fifty kids walking along the roadway.

  My friends turned down the volume, but so did the other kids nearby, even though I wasn’t directly talking to them.

  “See?” Tyler whispered. “You’re pulling a Gandalf.”

  We walked like that for another mile before we approached a crossroad with eight or ten soccer moms standing at the corner. The ladies anxiously watched us approach and one-by-one they clapped with joy when their child ran up to them. By the time we reached the corner, there were only a couple left by themselves.