Preppers of the Apocalypse - Part 1: Post Apocalyptic EMP Survival (2 page)

“Thanks,”
said Ash.

“Don’t
thank me. Just get the hell out of Pasture.”

Ash
shook his head. “Wish I could, but my Merc died. What are you doing out?”

“The
lights and heating went,” said Tony. “Had a look at the breakers but couldn’t see
anything wrong, so I came to find Alec. He’s the electrician. Looks like the
grid is gone.”

“There’s
a nuclear power plant twenty five miles away,” said Ash. “Maybe we should go
borrow some of their power.”

Tony
put the pistol in his pocket. “You shouldn’t joke about that. I hope to hell
their grid’s okay.”

“Listen.
I really need to use a phone, Tony. You got a cell?”

“What’s
wrong?”

“I
was on the phone to my wife and my cell died. I need to call the police.”

“She
in trouble?”

Ash
felt his chest contract until it was hard to breathe.

“I
hope not.”

“Best
I can do is taking you to the station,” said Tony.

Tony
guided him through the darkened streets of Pasture Down. Ash looked through
every window that they passed but none had power. If it wasn’t for the fact
that he saw movement inside some of the houses, he would have sworn it was a
ghost town. It seemed like everyone had just upped and left in the middle of
the night. It was ridiculous really, how much we took electricity for granted,
and the panic it caused when it went. Even a few hours without power caused an
upheaval.

When
they got to the police station they found the door open.

“Sheriff
Ellie’s a night owl,” said Tony.

They
walked inside and found the sheriff with the telephone at her ear. She was bent
forward over the desk and pressing the numbers on the handset. For a second
Ash’s heart leapt, and he felt like rushing over there and grabbing the
receiver out of her hands. All he could think about was Georgia at home with
someone in the house. He wanted to throw up.

The
sheriff slammed the phone down. Next to her was a kerosene lamp that cast a dim
glow over the room.

“Powers
out everywhere,” she said, and got out of her seat. “Been trying the phone for
thirty minutes but it won’t even dial. It’s that damn nuclear plant, I bet.
Fiddling with the grid. Sucking it dry.”

Ash
took a deep breath. Ellie was a stern woman and her matter-of-fact manner
worried him. He knew he’d screwed her over, yet here he was coming back to her
for help. Still, there was nothing else he could do.

“Sorry
Sheriff, but I’m in trouble. My wife’s hundreds of miles away and I think
there’s someone in the house.”

The
sheriff walked over to a coat stand and picked up her police department jacket.
It looked bulky in the sleeves and had a brown fur collar that was worn away
through years of use. On the back of the jacket was an eagle, the emblem of the
Pasture Down PD.

“I
don’t give a damn about your wife,” said Ellie.

Ash
felt his cheeks start to heat up. He didn’t get angry too often, but when he
did it spilled over until he was blind with it, and that was when his lips ran
too fast for his rational mind to catch up. He couldn’t afford that to happen today.

“There’s
someone in the house with her. I gotta get there. I have to tell someone. I
really need your help.”

Ellie
walked over to her desk and picked up a pre-rolled cigarette. She bit a few
stray stands of tobacco off the end and spat them down on the floor.

“I’ll
tell you who’s got problems,” she said. “My son. He keeps high-tailing it out
of our house. Goes missing for hours on end. Then when I send a cruiser to pick
him up, he gets a temper like you wouldn’t believe. He’s like a little Pitbull.
I was saving up money to take him to a behavioural therapist, but some son of a
bitch convinced me that I could treble the cash with one of his investments.”

“I’m
sorry,” said Ash.

“Not
sorry enough,” said Ellie.

She
picked up her pistol from the desk and pointed it at Ash’s head. For a second
his stomach turned to water and he thought she might shoot him. Instead, she
jerked it in the direction of the cell at the end of the room. The iron-barred
door was open and the tiny cell was swamped in darkness. It looked like the
kind of place the town drunk would sleep off a dozen whiskeys.

“That’s
where you’re gonna spend the night,” she said.

“What?
Why?”

Ellie
gave a flicker of a grin.

“From
the bruises on your face it looks like you’ve been in a punch-up. Hopefully
it’s one you lost. In any case, I’m arresting you for brawling. We don’t need
the likes of that in our town.”

Ash
couldn’t believe it. It felt like the stars were aligning above him, but not to
work in his favour. Instead they were conspiring against him and looking for
ways to screw him over. Maybe this was payback for everything he had done.
Perhaps it didn’t matter how good your reasons were, if the things you did were
wrong.

He
looked at Tony, but the man shrugged.

“Can’t
do a thing,” he said.

Ash
looked at the gun and then looked at Ellie’s face, but he didn’t see sympathy
in it. Instead he saw a woman who would be happy to shoot him and then say he
was resisting arrest or something like that. As Ash went into the cell and sat
down, he had never felt more worthless. Ellie clicked the lock shut and walked
to the door of the station, leaving Ash alone in the darkness.

Chapter 3

The
sun rose and fell twice while Ash was in the cell, and he grew weaker by the
minute. He remembered the rule of three and then he licked his tongue over his
cracked lips. He hadn’t eaten since the sandwich he’d demolished in the seat of
his car before leaving Pasture, and after two days he felt skinny enough to
just squeeze through the bars and walk out of the station. It wasn’t possible,
of course, but he didn’t see how the hell he was going to get out of there
otherwise.

The
sounds outside didn’t tell him much about what was happening. At one point he
heard a woman scream, and a few hours later the voices of a gang of men drifted
through. The sounded like they were fighting each other, or more likely that a
group of them were fighting one man. Later still he got a faint smell of smoke,
and then after that a car drove down the road.

He
tried to concentrate on the sounds outside but his mind always drifted. It left
his jail cell, flew over Pasture Down, across the mountain range and over the
city. It stopped two hundred and twenty six miles away on a suburban street
outside of the city where he and Georgia lived. The image, usually such a nice
one, turned dark in his mind and he thought that he could hear Georgia’s
screams as someone invaded their home. He wanted to grip the bars of the cell
and rip them out with brute force.

He
couldn’t believe that nobody had come for him. He knew the power had gone, but
surely that didn’t warrant leaving the station unattended for days. Where the
hell was Ellie?
Some sheriff she was.

The
station door opened. Ash sprang off his seat and stood at the bars.

“About
time,” he said, trying to put a brave face over how wretched he felt.

It
wasn’t the sheriff who walked in. Instead it was Tony Shore. He wore a hunting
jacket and cradled a rifle in his hands. He had two bottles of mineral water in
his pocket and an ammo belt was slung around his torso. A compass hung off his
lapel, and a solar powered torch was in his chest pocket. His cargo pants were
splattered with mud. Dark bags sagged under his eyes and made him look like he
hadn’t slept in days.

“Where
the hell is everyone?” said Ash.

Tony
pulled a bottle of water out of his pocket and threw it toward Ash. It bounced
off a black bar and fell to the floor. Ash picked it up, twisted the lid and
drank it in five seconds. The last time he’d drained a bottle that quickly was
when he was in his college dorm surround by five guys goading him on, but that
sure as hell hadn’t been water.

He
threw the bottle to the floor and wiped his lips. They were wet now, but they
had been cracked so long that the skin had torn. With his thirst quenched, he
felt his stomach cramp up.

“Don’t
suppose you got a burger in that thing?” he said, pointing at Tony’s jacket.

Tony
shook his head. “Don’t think we’ll be having quarter pounders for a while.”

“I’ll
settle for you letting me out of here, then.”

Tony
walked over to the sheriff’s desk. He shuffled papers aside and then opened a
drawer. He pulled out a silver ring of keys. He walked over to the cell and
stopped a few feet in front of Ash with the keys dangling off his finger.

“Say
sorry,” he said.

Ash
nearly fell over. He shook the bars.

“What?”

“Admit
what you did and apologise to me.”

“We
don’t have time to mess around here. Something’s happened to Georgia and I need
to get the hell out of this town.”

Tony
gripped the keys in his hand.

“It’s
scary when your family is in danger, isn’t it?”

“Please
Tony, just let me out.”

“Apologise.”

He
knew he should say sorry, but he couldn’t form the words. It wasn’t as bad as
it seemed, what he had done, and he had a hell of a good reason for it. He took
the job when the doctors had given him the news that his sperm was weak as
hell. Either weak, or low in volume. To be honest, he’d tuned out while the doc
spoke and had stared at Georgia instead. He saw the way tears brimmed on her
eyes and how her shoulders sagged as if she was defeated. That’s why he’d taken
this job. He knew it was shady as hell, but he couldn’t think about that. The
only way he’d been able to hold it together was to push everything back. If he
let it out now, he’d be releasing years of guilt and it would probably flood
everywhere and drown him.

He
shook his head.

“I
can’t,” he said.

Tony
walked up to the cell. He reached out with the keys, but at the last second
brought his foot back and kicked the bars. The metal made a ringing sound and
Ash stepped back in shock. Tony’s face twisted until he looked like a different
version of himself, one that Ash felt he should be wary of.

Finally
Tony put the key in the lock and twisted. The bolt clanged and the doors
loosened, and when Ash stepped out he felt like the claustrophobia and
suffocation dropped away.

“You’re
lucky there are people better than you in this world,” said Tony.

Ash
walked over the Ellie’s desk and picked up a phone. It was dead. He uselessly
pressed the buttons, but nothing happened.  He knew that in severe power
outages, not just fuses blowing, the telephone lines would go down. The fact
was that with each passing year the things we used were getting more sensitive
to electrical and power problems, not less.

Tony
started to walk across the station. When he reached the door, he stopped.

“Wait,”
said Ash. “Where are you going?”

Tony
turned round. He zipped up his coat to his chin and held his rifle in both
hands. From here he looked like a hunter on a trip, but Ash wondered if there
was more to it than that. The power shortage didn’t seem normal, and things
were going in a direction that he didn’t like. It was like the thing his dad
had always talked about; the obsessive idea of his that had finally smashed him
and Ash’s mom apart. Dad had spoken about the end of civilisation as if it was
a known fact, and he’d let his preparation for it destroy his marriage. Ash
felt like he knew what was happening, but he just didn’t want to say the words.

“Pasture
is done,” said Tony. “The power’s gone and it doesn’t look like it’s coming
back. A few people drove out of town and that’s the last we saw of them. I
don’t suppose you know, but someone smashed the pharmacy window and cleaned out
the drug aisle. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but I got a family to
look after. They’re in Greenock on a patch of land I own, and I gotta get back
to them.”

“Greenock’s
out west isn’t it?” said Ash.

Tony
nodded. “Fifty miles out of Pasture. About as far away from the power station
as you can get without leaving the town jurisdiction. I’m a Pasture boy and
don’t want to leave, but I also like my distance.”

“Damn.
That’s the opposite direction to me.”

Tony
looked at the ground. Ash could tell that he felt bad for him. Tony seemed like
a good guy, and he’d already done more than enough to help a man who had
knowingly swindled him out of money. The fact that he had come back for him at
all was going above and beyond. Despite that, Ash couldn’t leave Georgia alone.
Every time he thought of her and what might have happened, he wanted to scream.

“Can
I borrow your car?” he said. “Mine’s dead.”

“Are
you out of your mind? You think I’d lend you my pick-up?”

“Your
phone then? Something?”

Tony
lifted a hand off his rifle and ran it through his hair. The top of his blonde
hair was thick and it seemed like he found it tough to run his fingers through
it. For a guy in his forties he had a fine head of hair.

“Do
you understand what’s happening here Ash?”

“I
don’t have a goddamn clue.”

“EMP
would be my bet. If you want to talk to your wife, then you better get the hell
out of Pasture Gate and take your chances in the city.”

Stepping
outside the station made him feel like he’d walked through a wormhole and into
a parallel dimension. It was daylight now, and the glint of the sun let him see
how much Pasture Down had changed since he’d been in his cell. The main street
ran by the station and covered a hundred metres before turning a corner, and
along it were the offices and shops of the town. As recently as a week ago they
would have been open for business on a day like this, but instead of shop
displays advertising sales, several of them had smashed glass and splintered doors
that had been forced open.

Someone
had dragged a sofa and two chairs out of a furniture shop and left them in the
middle of the road. The Reedley pharmacy, as Tony had said, had been raided,
and the front of the store was littered with discarded brown vials of pills. A
couple of cars were abandoned on the roadside, one with the front doors open
and another with a set of keys sitting on the roof with a pink fluffy dice on
the keyring.  None of the shops were open, and not a single building showed the
signs of having any power.

There
was a smell in the air of food starting to rot. South down the street was a
butcher’s shop, and Ash supposed that the refrigerators had failed and the meat
had begun to spoil. It was crazy that just a few days without power were all it
took to tear the fabric of society. He looked at the butcher’s shop again and
thought of the rotting carcases.

Salt
your meat,
said a voice.

Ash
realised it was the voice of his father in his head. He remembered dad sitting
across from him on a log and roasting a pork leg on a spit. He explained to Ash
how to make food last longer. For meat such as pork, the best way was to salt
the meat, because that meant that the things that normally make food rot, such
as mold and microbes, lost their moisture and with it their ability to ruin
your lovely pork joint.

He
wished his father had given him advice about what to do if he was stranded
hundreds of miles away from home, in a town where everyone hated him, with no
transport and a wife in danger. Even the old man would have been lost with this
one, no matter how good a survivalist and prepper he was.

He
needed to get transport. That had to be the first step. But how was he going to
do that? The only way, he guessed, was to buy a car off someone. He couldn’t
really afford to spare the cash, but what other option did he have? In times like
these, money didn’t mean much.

He
crossed the street to where a green dollar sign marked the outside of a bank.
He stood in front of the ATM, reached into his back pocket and pulled out his
brown wallet. He took out his bank card and was about to try and put it in the
machine when he stopped.

What
the hell am I doing?

It
seemed like his brain was trying to cling onto the world that he used to know,
and it was yet another example of how much he took things for granted. His
money was in the bank and the banks had gone belly up, at least around here.
With the power gone and computers down, did their money even exist anymore? Did
the dollars stored in the bank vaults still belong to those who put them there,
or once the digital numbers disappeared, did people’s life savings go down the
plug hole too?

He
decided the only thing that he could do would be to sell the Merc, but it was
miles out of town and he didn’t think he could face the walk in his present
condition.

He
looked at the end of the street where Tony was starting to disappear from view.
Part of him wanted to go with him to his land outside the town. At least it
would be safe there, he guessed. As Tony turned the corner, Ed noticed the town
hall at the end of the road. There was a wooden sign outside with words painted
on it in red.

Emergency
Town Meeting. Come one and All. Everyone Must Help.