“Yeah. That’s right. Infiltrators came up illegal from Mexico. Cubans mostly. They managed to infiltrate SAC bases in the Midwest, several down in Texas and wreaked a helluva lot of havoc, I’m here to tell you.” – Red Dawn
Tough times. Oh, sure, they make you strong, but I’d much rather have donuts.
This is part eight of a multipart series. The rest of them are here: (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo, TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold, and TEOTWAWKI Part VII: Laws of Survival, Mad Dogs, and The Most Interesting Man in the World )
The story to date: Our resourceful protagonist was far from home the night in February when an EMP hit, taking with it all of the society and the plentiful PEZ® it has provided. He’s bicycled and walked until he’s on the final stretch home, 20 miles away, 83 hours after the EMP. He’s already lost six pounds. So if you were looking for an upside for the end of the world? Your pants won’t be so tight.
The Highway Outside of Yona, 1;30PM
As I got to the stop sign at the main highway, I found myself for the third time in three days staring down the barrel of a gun. This time an AR variant. And as I looked to the left I saw another man pointing a deer rifle at me. The rush of adrenaline didn’t stop me from noticing that both men had their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. And that there was a dead body off to my right.
“Where you headed, spear-boy?”
“Millerville.”
“Not this way, you ain’t.”
In a movie he would have spit on the highway to make his point – a huge wad of tobacco juice. He didn’t. In fact, he didn’t look happy about being here at all. He looked like an accountant.
But I looked over at the makeshift barricade that they’d thrown together – several cars with sandbags out in front. They’d arranged them so they completely blocked off the highway, but it looked like they could move two of them to open it up, if they had to.
And the man who spoke wasn’t anything special – he was my age, a full three days’ worth of beard, dressing what looked like bowhunting camouflage, a bit too tight, as if he’d bought it a few years ago and hadn’t used it. As I took in the barricade in front of me I counted about a dozen people who were pointing their rifles at me, not just the two I’d first seen. Even though I’d come around a blind corner where they’d been concealed by the trees, they obviously had someone continuously watching that approach.
“Hands up, and drop the spear.”
I complied.
“Alright. Good. I’m tired of shooting people who won’t listen. Now what you’re going to do is to turn left and head due north. We’ll sit and watch you. And then you’re never going to come back this way again. Do we understand each other?”
“Listen, I just need to get to Millerville. I wouldn’t even have to go through Yona to get there. I’m from Millerville.” I hated pleading. But family was that way, and going north? They could see me walking away for miles, which is probably why they picked this spot to cut off the main highway into town. And once I crossed over the little hill, I had no idea how to get home – the rivers, creeks, ranches and small hills weren’t impassible, but the chances of me getting turned around or blundering into the rifle sights of a farmer who’d rather be left alone were pretty high.
“I don’t really care. This is not my problem, and I’m not letting you be a danger to my family. Nothing personal, bub, but I know nothing about you.”
One of the rifleman, this one an older gentleman with a real beard and a lever action adjusted his glasses. “Phil, I do. That’s the Scoutmaster from Millerville. We don’t want to go shooting up Scoutmasters, do we? We just might need some of what they teach.”
I looked, and under that retirement beard I recognized the face of another Boy Scout leader. It had been two years since I’d been the Scoutmaster – I’d turned over that badge to a younger father, but I wasn’t about to correct . . . what was his name . . . Ted? Yes. Ted. I wasn’t about to correct Ted now.
“Ted, is that you?”
“It is. Guys, put your guns down.” He looked back at me. “You armed?”
I nodded.
“Please take it out, very slowly. Two fingers.” I remembered that Ted was retired Highway Patrol. Made sense that he was out here. Very slowly, almost geologically slowly, I pulled the pistol out of my the small of my back where I had pushed it down into my pants.
I held it out to my side – two fingers. Ted slung his rifle over his shoulder, walked up and gently took the pistol from me. He ejected the magazine, and then worked the action to extract the bullet in the chamber, and put all of it in a voluminous coat pocket.
“Is that everything?”
“I also have a multitool.”
“Where is that?”
“In my backpack.”
“Leave it there.”
He turned back to the rest of the men. “We’re good. We’ll keep him here until shift change, then I’ll walk him through to the south barricade and see him on his way.”
Phil looked at Ted, ignoring me. “Why don’t we send him up the road like everyone else? He’s not from Yona. We don’t owe him anything. We have to protect ourselves.”
“Phil, Yona isn’t suddenly going to move. A week from now, two weeks from now, next year Millerville is going to be there. How would we look if we started treating people we know like the enemy? Also, keep in mind, if I know him, people in Millerville know him, he isn’t just another face in the crowd. We need to be on peaceful relations with Millerville.”
Yona was just up the road, and the Yona Wildcats were regular losers against the Millerville Pirates on the gridiron every fall. The rivalry was there, but it had never been worse than a logo burned into an opposing field or a team name spray painted on the water tower. They motioned me behind the barricade. In a friendly manner, Ted asked me to recount what I’d seen out there. I did. After we had talked for a bit, he motioned to one of the barricade vehicles. “No reason not to sit down a spell – you’ve done a lot of walking.”
I sat in the bed of an older F150 pickup and waited. Half an hour later, a group of people came walking down the road towards the barricade – there were probably forty of them. Having two miles to watch their approach made it almost painful. Finally, they were about half a mile out.
“Positions, gentlemen.”
When the group got to 100 yards out, one of the Yona defenders fired a single warning shot.
“That’s close enough,” Phil yelled. “Send one man up. One only.”
One man walked forward from the group.
When he was 20 yards out, Phil said, “Close enough. Hands up.” He was standing next to the dead body on the road that I’d seen first.
“Hey, you don’t know how good it is to see you. We’ve been walking for three days, from Albany. I have children with us. And we have sick people. You have to help us.” Albany was just outside of the big city.
“How many are there?”
“Thirty.”
“Any doctors, engineers, builders?” This was from Ted.
“Nah, man, we’ve got a car dealer, a banker – he’s really rich, two sales clerks, I own a steam cleaning company. Couple of guys who were truck drivers.”
Ted replied, “Sorry. You’ll have to go back the way you came.”
The man got irate. “You can’t treat us like that! We have rights! We need your help! You can’t make us leave!” His hands dropped and he began digging in his jacket and produced a revolver. Before he could swing the revolver towards the Phil, three shots from three different rifles hit him. His body crumpled to the pavement.
A woman from the group started screaming “Noooo,” and started running toward us. A single warning shot rang out, and she was tackled from behind by one of the group.
They carried her back up the road, away from the barricade, and started moving back the way they had come from. The message had been clear.
The body was pulled off to the side of the road, by one of the defenders. Jacob? He had played football for Yona and was a former Scout. He picked up the pistol and checked it.
“Ted, why did you turn him away?”
Ted turned to me. “I hate this. I hate it so much. But not 24 hours after this all happened, a group came in on this very road in an older car. They shot up downtown. They forced their way into homes. They did despicable things. They killed 20 people before we killed them. And there were only six of them! And that was the first day. We’ve had more every day since then. Some seemingly innocent like this group. Some obviously not. We’ve got to protect ourselves. And we can’t afford to feed the entire state. I’m expecting that you’ll see the same at Millerville.”
“But, Ted, what about compassion? These folks weren’t a threat.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. What did you know about them? Would they have been trouble? What did they have to do to get here? I’d love to help them, I swear to God I would. But over a million people lived over there. We have a town of five thousand. There’s no way we can help them all. Are we our brother’s keeper? Sure. But will die if we try to help them all.”
Nothing else happened until the end of the shift, at 6PM. Ted mentioned that they liked to change the shifts in daylight – that way they didn’t shoot each other.
Ted and the group walked me on the highway to the southern checkpoint. Now I was fifteen miles from home, but exhausted, and it was dark. Ted kept my pistol and said I could come back for it sometime. We shook hands. The squad manning the barricades indicated I would be welcome staying with them. I slept in the passenger seat of an old Nissan Xterra with my blanket pulled tightly around me. It was the best sleep I’d had in three days.
I woke up when the bullet smashed through the rear window of the Xterra and out the window where I was sleeping.
Fort Custer, EMP +3
The morning of day three, a corporal in 1st Platoon, Charlie Company asked a simple question.
“They’ve forgotten us. Who wants to get out?”
Pretty soon the men began planning. None of them were local. They had argued about where to go, but the Corporal, Walt Davis, said “Why don’t we go, well, where it is we go. We’ve been training for years for this crap. Now we’re in it. And we’re not too far from the sort of equipment that could make us kings around here!”
“Let’s plan for the basics, like we’ve been trained – transport. Weapons. Supplies. Communication. Anything that will give us a tactical advantage. Then let’s find a nice farm town with nice curvy farm girls and take over. No offense, Valdez.”
She grinned, “I might like a curvy farm girl myself, Walt.”
The platoon laughed. Valdez wasn’t picky.
By noon they had managed to scrape together two transport trucks that were still working, and functioned on diesel. Manny, a private from Alabama, maintained that if it was diesel, he could keep it running forever. Weapons were a different matter. Liberating their fully automatic M-4s, several crates of ammo and grenades hadn’t been all that hard. The soldiers guarding that armory were long gone, and getting it required persistence, but little else.
The heavy artillery – the anti-personnel mines, the mortars and other crew-served weapons were tightly locked up, and those soldiers were dug in and gung-ho. Getting them would be more trouble than it was worth. Davis reasoned that the automatic weapons and grenades they had would be enough to melt almost anything the platoon would see outside.
Corporal Davis looked at the loaded trucks and 1st Platoon, Charlie Company. “Let’s go! I’m hungry, the world’s gone, and we might as well take what we want!” Only about half the platoon was following Walt. The rest had decided to stay and wait for orders, but weren’t willing to try to stop Walt. That made Walt happy – he didn’t need anyone slowing him down. Or anyone competing to give orders.
When the trucks hit the chain link gates at noon, they were going forty miles an hour. The gates didn’t even slow them down.
### (for now)
How will society react after a world-changing catastrophe? In the large cities, as we’ve discussed, order is only thinly maintained, and at the cost of a constant battle between the police and the barely attached members of society that view gang violence as a good day. Lost in that is the respect for civil rights, but enshrined in that is that good behavior is like a two year old with a cookie jar – it’s reserved for when someone is looking.
I’m Tony Montana. You killed my doughnut. Prepare to diet.
Power off, lights out, police gone? Quickly any and all red lines or blue lines break down into chaos and fire and bloodshed. If there weren’t ample evidence of this in the history of large cities in the United States, I’d think the previous sentence was overly dramatic and probably an exaggeration. But after the Los Angeles riots of the 1990’s and the New York riots of “whenever the power goes off” and the constant bloodshed of a Chicago, it should be clear that we’re only keeping civilization in place through a pretty significant effort, combined with a curtailment of civil liberties.
That’s the problem Yona has. Yona is Cherokee for “bear” and it’s likely that the last bear was killed in Yona in 1890. But Yona’s problem isn’t bears – Yona is a city in the direct line of drift from the Big City. As people abandon the criminal killing machine that Big City has become, they spread out, and are becoming less concentrated. But a group, even a small group, showing up unexpectedly in Yona armed, drunk and without any trappings of society? That made Yona make hard decisions, quickly.
And the hard decisions will show up like they always have in history. Blood first. Are they your kin? Even a crappy cousin is better than a stranger. Are they from your town? The citizens from small towns will band to protect each other first. Every able bodied man (and woman?) will quickly be deputized. Arms, generally in surplus in small towns, will be common.
Here’s a map of what an EMP might look like. Yeouch. The plus side? It looks like a smiley-faced cyclops clown. (Source- Doomstead Diner)
As our protagonist learned, ties to other small towns will help – whatever they are. Family and cousins and bankers and other prominent folks who have connections across the lines, even football coaches, will help keep conflict at bay. The Boy Scout relationship is just one I picked that would be unusual enough to help our protagonist, but one that would really happen. Again, blood first, but if you’ve been in the same organization? You’re closer than a stranger, you often know something about the values of the person involved.
Well, you can pick your nose, but not your family.
If you’re not kin or related to the town in some way? You’ll be turned away. I think the people in the small towns will learn to be comfortable with violence to protect themselves quickly, especially after they’ve been attacked by bad guys (or just scared guys) drifting their way.
The people in the biggest difficulty will be the people from the big city who don’t have skills that are needed in small towns in a newly technology-free world. Does the small town need city planners or lawyers after TEOTWAWKI? Nope. Doctors? Sure. People who know steam cleaning? No. People who know how steam power works? Yes. Your value is determined by whatever tangible value you can provide, not your existence, or your ability to create a great presentation to the board of directors. Your rights will be a thing of the past.
And 1st Platoon, Charlie Company?
They have a story to tell, too.
When it is time for you to defend your town, learn from these mistakes. Warning shots. Figure out a better way. No one will be making more ammunition. Fixed defense. Roadblocks are where 99% of the action is, as people are gay about their cars and know no other way. I’d be moving off the road and bypassing the roadblock. So could a sniper. So could a squad. You need to block the road further away from town, and have patrols. Taking in “professionals”. Everyone always wants doctors or engineers or scientists. This goes back to at least “Lucifer’s Hammer” if not before. You are assuming a lot of food surplus to feed these people. Now, ask yourself how these people are going to do their jobs. How is a doctor going to do anything without electricity, or antibiotics or pain killers or anything else that is oil based and JIT delivered. What good is a mechanic when the gas is a very finite resource? Odds are you’ll be farming everywhere just for people calories. Ethanol calories will be a luxury. And so it goes for every expert you thought you needed.
Great points!
The first two I’ll elaborate on in a future installment. The barricades are about 2 miles outside of town (on the north and south).
As to the last point on experts? Yeah, these guys are new at this. They don’t even know what they don’t know. A friend of mine just pointed out (in a phone call) that you don’t need doctors, you need nurses and physicians assistants. Since this town has no medical staff at all, they’re looking for something – they do have injured people already.
Ah, apologies on the comment re: barricades. I didn’t express myself well at all. I was thinking you blow or barricade bridges leading to town, something to channel the mobs naturally away from you, on to the other road at a fork. Even a crude attempt at a block, such as stretching some wire across the road, with the corpses of trespassers in front with signs. Avoid some confrontation. Fiction with everyone knowing all this would be boring, so I understand the need for the opposite. Just trying to keep the Reality Check option open. Great job-keep going. Better than a lot of Kindle authors out there putting such drivel out.
No, please keep commenting! There are places where I’m doin’ drama, and places where . . . I’m differently smart. This is a great place for the discussion!!!!
Good stuff! On the subject of barricades, if there isn’t a handy terrain feature like the sharp curve, a town or group would want to put up barriers in such a way to force anyone approaching in a vehicle to slow down before they reach the gate so they can’t force the road block. If they have the man power, they should also have an overwatch element that can engage from a flank or even trap someone stopped at the roadblock. The concern is they may have some organized group that has a scout or two to warn of road blocks and try to out flank them.
Thanks!!!
These are awesome comments. More on barricades in a week or two – comments welcome!!
In this case, it’s a wide, sweeping curve coming down a hill. Huge visibility for miles on the major highway, but nothing to slow anyone down. And everyone is just hunkered down at the barricades at this point.