Preppers of the Apocalypse - Part 1: Post Apocalyptic EMP Survival Read online

  “So is your head.”

  The streets of Pasture Down were hardly Vegas at the best of times, but Ash had never seen them this dark before. Ash looked as far as he could along town, and he couldn’t see a single light glowing. By the car, one of the men held an oil lamp over the bonnet.

  “Not a great thing to do when you’re checking the oil,” said Ash. “What if it caught fire?”

  The men turned to look at him. Ash felt his stomach tighten when he realised that he’d sat in the living room one of the men not long ago and told him how much a good idea it was that he transfer a few thousand into Ash’s company’s account.

  Don’t worry yourself a second. A few thousand now becomes ten thousand in a year. That’s a new car. An extension on your house. You’ll be the envy of everyone on your street.

  Recognition flitted in the man’s eyes and his face became stone. He stepped forward, and the dirty rag fell from his shoulder.

  “Wouldn’t bother me if it set on fire,” he said. “As long as you were in it.”

  The beefy-shouldered man squinted.

  “That the fella who screwed you over?”

  The man nodded. “That’s him.”

  Ash could sense that it was going to get ugly.

  “Listen fellas. I’ve got an emergency.”

  “Unless you’re blind, you can see that we all got one. Goddamn power cut.”

  Ash swallowed.

  “Which way’s the station?”

  “What business you got with the law?” said the man. He bent and picked up the rag and wrapped it around his fist like a prize-fighter.

  In the space of a few seconds they’d circled him, and Ash didn’t even have time to run. All he could do was try to duck and dodge as fists flew at his face. His cheeks stung with each blow and he heard a crack when the beefy-shouldered guy hit his nose with a haymaker. For a second, Ash was blinded by pain.

  A red pick-up truck turned the corner and pulled to a stop in the middle of the road. It looked like a standard Toyota, except that it had been adapted so that the back of it had a waterproofed roof and hooks along the framework for bags to be stored. The engine faded, and for a few seconds the punches stopped. Ash got up from his knees and saw that Tony Shore, the man from the parking lot, walked towards them.

  “Pretty handy fists, fellas. You get off on a three-way?”

  “The hell do you want, Tony? Thought you were too good for the town?”

  “Yeah,” added beef shoulders, “What are you doing away from your ranch?”

  Tony’s gritted his teeth. “I’ve got as much right to be here as you. Just because I live outside Pasture don’t mean I’m not from here. Now you better leave this fella alone.”

  The man tightened the rag around his fist.

  “Maybe you’re looking for a beating too?”

  Tony reached into his pocket and pulled out a Smith & Wesson M & P pistol. He pointed it at the man’s head.

  “Maybe you’re looking to lose your head.”

  The men grumbled and walked over to their car, but not before beef shoulders gave Ash a kick in the gut. Wheezing, Ash felt an arm hook underneath his armpit and pull him to his feet. Tony Shore smiled at him. It wasn’t a warm smile, and Ash could tell that contempt was hidden underneath it, but he would take whatever help he could get right now.

  “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 wer
e 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.