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“Everything they had that I read is way too large scale to implement with us, or even as a neighborhood.  I don’t know of anyone in the neighborhood who even has a home generator, much less something that could power several homes.  We might be able to cobble something together with the one from the convenience store, maybe, but we’d have to steal it, and I’d really rather not do that.”

“The other option is to take what we can as a group, plus whoever else we trust and would all want to bring along, and head somewhere safe for the time being.  I don’t know where that would be though.  It’s going to get crazy and one place may be just as good, or bad, as another.  Here’s where I’m open to suggestions.”

Chuck shrugged, “One of the guys at work, Pete, said he’s heading to Oklahoma.  He’s got family out there with land, and I guess he’s been preparing for the end of the world.  He said he already had gas for the truck and means to get it out of tanks at gas stations without power.  Didn’t strike me as all that odd at the dam, but in hindsight he almost seemed to be looking forward to it.”

Chuck directed his question more to Eric than the rest of the group.  “Are you more inclined to head for the hills, or just be a little out of the way?  Or, I guess a better way to ask the question is how long are you thinking we need to set out to be self-sufficient for?  There’s a big difference between roughing it for a couple of months and trying to make it through the winter in a tent.”

“I don’t think it will take more than a month for things to quiet back down,” Eric replied. “But for that month, I think we should be a half-day’s travel by foot or a couple of hours by car from the nearest someplace if we can manage it.

“Ideally, I’d love to find a summer camp with cabins that people had abandoned by the time we got there, but the likelihood of that is pretty slim.  Same with hunting cabins and summer places in the mountains.”

Joel and Rachael hadn’t been contributing much up ‘til now, but Joel had an idea at this point.  “Eric, you mentioned that the Army had a plan in place for this.  Was the National Guard included in the plan?”

“I don’t know, why?”

“Well, we have an armory here in town.  If they were included, wouldn’t they be implementing the plan?  And if so, how quickly?”

Eric thought for a minute before he answered, but the look on his face wasn’t very encouraging.  “Possibly, probably, but I’m not sure.  The problem with the Guard, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, is that the majority of it needs to be activated.  Short of driving around to pick everyone up there isn’t a whole lot they can do to get them together with the phones out.”

“I don’t recall reading anything in the Army plans I had access to involving any of the Guard units, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t plans to include them.”

“The other potential problem with activating the guard during an emergency is the scope of the emergency.  Getting to muster won’t be as important to some of them when their family is involved and they haven’t officially been activated.  I can’t say that I necessarily blame them.”

“Well then, what’s the chance of appealing to their sense of self-interest and taking some of them and their equipment with us?” Rachael asked.

“If I had to guess, I’d say about fifty-fifty.  The longer it goes on and there’s no communication from higher up the greater the likelihood some might come with us.

“We also need to keep in mind what I said about the electricity.  It won’t be out forever.  With the right plan and people working together, we could be eighty percent back to normal in six months.  The military and Government could be--probably will be--back online sooner, if there are spares to be had.  For all we know, NORAD never even went offline.”

Eric ran his hands over his face and through his habitually crew-cut hair.  The silence in the kitchen seemed to last most of the morning, although it was less than ten seconds.  It was Joshua who broke it from the hallway.  Nobody had heard him and his sister come downstairs shortly after Eric and Karen came back with Joel.

“Mom, Dad, Maya and I think we should go ahead and get out of the more populated areas.  Dad, I think we need to break the news to Mom now, too.”

With the raise of Rachael’s eyebrows, Joel responded before she could ask.  “Although I agree with you on both counts, Josh, thank you so much for your tact and impeccable sense of timing and decorum.  Remind me to thank you properly at some point in the very near future.”

“Rachael, as our son has so eloquently stated, there is something you should know.  Please wait here.  You, young man,” he pointed at Josh, “come with me.  It’s yours, you get to carry it from here on out.  When we come back downstairs you will stand around the corner until I tell you to come out and then if there are any questions it is between you and your mother, understood?”

Josh swallowed, “Yes sir.”  It had seemed like a good time to bring it up; now, not so good.  Joel and Josh went upstairs and Rachael heard them go into the master bedroom.  She was pretty sure she heard the gun safe open.  She was almost positive Joel wasn’t going to kill their son--almost--but Joel had seemed pretty upset about being blindsided by something.  She couldn’t imagine Joel was this mad about a gun; they had a number of them in the house, and Joel was an avid hunter.  She didn’t necessarily have a problem with guns either; there was a place for them as long as they were handled properly.  Rachael noticed that Maya was being uncharacteristically quiet throughout this whole episode, though.  She’d have to have a talk with her daughter about exactly which secrets to keep and which ones to let slip in the future.

When they came back downstairs, Joel came around the corner by himself.  “Rachael, I ask that you keep two things in mind.  One, technically it is simply a rifle--very, very similar to both of my hunting rifles.  Two, he researched it and bought it with money he earned himself.  He wasn’t old enough to purchase it, that’s where I had to come in, but it’s his.  I don’t say that to remove the blame…but don’t strangle me, please.  Come on out, Josh.”

Rachael, to her credit, did an academy award winning job of keeping her jaw off the floor.  Now she knew why Joel had been so upset at being blindsided.  This had been a constant back and forth argument between them since shortly after they were newlyweds, and now her son had snuck out and bought an AR-15 rifle.

“I just have one question.  Did you buy one too?”  Rachael asked.

At that point Eric started to laugh out loud.

“Joel, I know we’ve fought this back and forth but at this point, I guess I’m glad that there’s one in the house.”

“To answer your question,” Joel answered, “no, I didn’t.  Although I really, really wanted one, I mean it’s so cool!  I figure if push comes to shove I could always be the one up in the bell tower with the 770 and pick ‘em off at a distance.”

“Sheri, Chuck, Eric, oh stop it, Karen, now that we’ve aired that dirty laundry what say you?  Apparently my son feels he’s the spokesman for the Taylor household, again, not that I disagree.”

“I’m for a trip.  Won’t call it a vacation because I don’t think it’ll be all that relaxing, but I don’t think hanging around Nashville for the next couple of months would be all that good an idea.”  Chuck said.

“I’m with Chuck,” Sheri agreed.

Chuck sat up a little straighter not even realizing he’d done so.

Karen and Eric had already decided they’d go with the group but had hoped they wouldn’t stay in the neighborhood or near the city.  With the decision looking made, Eric weighed in. “In that case, it looks like we’re all agreed.”

Interlude One

Within minutes of the power going out at the White House, the President was notified of what had happened.  Backup power was swiftly brought online and a third of the White House was running in under five minutes.  None of the portion that had power was visible from the street, however, as it wouldn’t be wise for the White House to be the only building “glowing” at this point.

Within thirty minutes, power was also restored to infrastructure deemed critical, such as the Capital Building, the Pentagon, and a dozen other buildings in Washington D.C.  Additionally, secondary communications links were brought online to re-establish links with NORAD, Bolling Air Force Base, the Marine Barracks at 8
^th
& I, and a half a dozen other points in the continental US.

Thirty-eight commercial communications satellites that now no longer functioned, having been destroyed by the recent CME, would cease to exist when they broke apart sometime in the next twenty-four hours.  At that time, the same number of much smaller, but fully functional--and until recently fully shielded and offline--military communications satellites would come online.  It hadn’t been so much a case of cloak-and-dagger as “why not”?

One communications company, who also happened to have a vested interest in military communications satellites, had been approached with a prototype design.  The design included a secondary satellite, encapsulated and fully shielded inside the outer satellite and electronically locked there.  The electronic lock was very simple: should the outer satellite fail without having the electronic lock permanently locked first, within twenty-four hours the lock would degrade and the outer satellite would literally come apart.

As the outer satellite came apart it would engage, or enable, the inner satellite--which would then bring itself online, determine its position via stellar and camera references, change its orbit if necessary, and begin its life as a military communications satellite.

In one of those rare combinations of planning, technological design, and execution, the first of these satellites, Communication Satellite FNC-8842-- commonly referred to as BERCOMM-4--split as neatly in half as a three-and-a-half-ton satellite can, and SECCOM-4, codename SPARROW-9, took flight.  Over the course of the next eighteen hours, all but three of the thirty-eight military satellites would properly come online in similar fashion.

Chapter Six

“Great.”  Joel had just finished rubbing his eyes when he noticed Eric’s posture and the look on his face change.  “What’s up?”

“It sounds like I might have been wrong about nobody in the neighborhood having a generator.  Most likely the portable kind, and it’s probably big enough to run most of their house a few pieces at a time for at least a while.  Until someone comes and takes it away, that is.”  Eric was shaking his head.

Sheri raised a questioning eyebrow.

“No, that’s not what I meant.  I don’t mean we should go confiscate the generator. I mean at some point someone else is going to do it.”

“That’s good to know, and I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean for it to come across that way.” Sheri replied.

“Not your fault, but thank you.  We can do our best to let people know what’s going on before we leave but some, most, will probably react the same way Joel and Rachael did, if not worse.”

“So maybe we have a fourth thing to consider.  How do we get the word out?”  Karen asked, and then looked at Joel.  “Isn’t Carey the new HOA President?”

Joel’s face was devoid of any emotion or animation whatsoever when he answered.  “Yes, Karen, he is.”

Karen’s eyes widened, “Everything OK, Joel?”

“No, Karen, it is not.”

“Care to fill us in?” Sheri asked.

“Not really but at this point it doesn’t look like I’ve got a whole lot of choice in the matter.”  Joel folded his arms and hunched down in his chair, taking a typical “I’m closed off” pose because he was starting to sulk about this morning again.  “It started about a month after Carey moved in, about six years ago.  I was the President of the HOA at the time, which I will
never
do again by the way, and Carey had already made a name for himself as someone who didn’t like to follow the rules.  He’d done a couple of things in his back yard that were skirting the bylaws and had made some changes to the exterior of his house that were in violation of the restrictive covenants.  We were in the process of getting a lien on the property since some of the work was structural and had been done without permits--
and
wasn’t to code.”

“I’ve noticed he lets his grass get a little long before he mows it.”  Sheri added.

“He lets it get practically knee high--right to the legal limit!”  Joel took a breath.  “Ok, so back then he tried to put in a bird bath or fountain or some ugly thing in the front yard, which is just plain not allowed.  I’d been referring everything to the management company to let them handle it but he knew I was the president and he knew I was the one making the calls.  Every few minutes while he’s putting this eyesore in, he’s glaring over his shoulder at me while I’m mowing my lawn, and I finally snapped.”

“I killed the mower and walked over and told him that what he was putting in wasn’t allowed by the CC&Rs.  We got into it, he asked me what business it was of mine, I told him I was the HOA president, etc., etc., etc.  I really wasn’t in his face about it but I did say that he got a copy of the bylaws before he bought the house and whether he read them or not, he was bound to them, and had agreed to them, and that he knew that.  He’s been using that ‘You’ve been telling me what I know and don’t know’ line for the last six years.”

“And now
he’s
the HOA president,” Karen said.

“Now he’s the HOA president.” Joel confirmed.  “As such he hasn’t done anything…yet.  I can’t prove it, but I’m sure he’s the reason that a couple of things we’ve wanted to do with the yard and the exterior of the house have been declined, though, since he’s been on the Architectural Review Board for a while.  The thing is he can be charming when he wants to be, and there’s quite the rift in our little community.”

Sheri didn’t say anything but she was nodding.

“Well, we’ve only lived here for six months but this table includes just about our entire group of friends.  We
know
some other people but as far as welcoming us in and making us feel at home, you’re pretty much it,” Karen said.

“Yep,” Eric said, “and I’ve noticed the same thing about Carey.  That’s the first time I’ve heard the whole story though.”