Chapter 7

It has been two weeks since we moved into the Camelot Motel. We even have the radio transmitter moved and the new phone number edited into the recorded announcement. I rigged up a small generator to power the rig, and the only modification involved finding a generator that ran off a diesel. Now, everything that we have at the motel all uses diesel fuel, and that is easy to come by. We have a tank truck that we use to haul fuel from the Navy base to the motels.

There is so much diesel fuel stored by the Navy and the Marines that we will probably bring in a large generator to use at night. I have been working with Ann to come up with a switching system that will automatically turn on the generator when the solar panels cannot keep up with demand. That should be ready by the end of the week. The Marine base had a diesel-powered generator that James knew about and we borrowed. That monster is large enough to power both motel systems if we don’t use the elevator or the electrical cooking units. That is a minor inconvenience, and we can easily live with it.

Mounted on the roof of each motel is an A/C and heating unit that draws very little current, so they should serve our needs. So far, the only thing we use the smaller motel for is the recreation room where the kids spend most of their evenings with the pool table, board games, and cards. Yes, we adults play a lot of bridge and poker in the evenings.

Everybody is now qualified with the AA-12. James is a remarkably competent instructor, and he has almost everybody learning or taking a refresher course in pistol shooting. We have found enough 9 mm Glocks so we have standardized on that pistol. Even La’Donna is learning to shoot a pistol.

The swimming pool is now in operation. We have two rules. There must be at least two people at the pool at one time, and one of those people must be over 15. The other rule is that clothing is optional. So far, all of the teens and younger skinny-dip, while the adults all wear suits. Every once in a while, Joan will go in topless, but that has been her limit.

We have not seen anyone else, nor have we received any more answers to our radio broadcasts. We are tentatively planning to stop the radio broadcasts after another six weeks. Surely, anybody who will call us will have heard our broadcast by then.

At last, things have settled down, and I can return to my plan to smoke out the ETs by making a concerted effort to destroy the fog machines. My plan is to visit the places where we have already destroyed the fog machines to make sure that they are out of commission. After that, we are going to work our way up the California coast destroying all of the fog machines that we can find. Hopefully, we can bust enough of them to attract the ETs’ attention.

I want to take Bob, Ann, and Samson with me in the RV. We’ll take our AA-12s and pistols with a lot of extra ammunition, especially the HEAT rounds that are so effective in destroying the fog machines. Everybody else will be left at the motels to make sure they are not taken over or trashed while we are gone. Because of his experience as a Marine, James will be left in charge.

James has suggested that we take a flame thrower as a backup weapon. He will teach me how to use one before we leave. There is a new version that uses napalm and is less dangerous to the user. There are several in storage at the Marine base, and that sounds like a good idea.

We are not hitting the fog machines in the same order as before, but we will get all of them that we can find. The ones at the Marine base and the Navy base are checked every time we go there for any reason, so we will skip those two. There are two more in San Diego that we will check on, and then we will head toward Yuma. We’ll go through Las Vegas and China Lake before turning west. Once we reach Vandenberg, we will head north.

I have no idea how long it will take for the ETs to react to our destruction, but I do hope that it is not too long. We tore up a couple of fog machines when we passed through Los Angeles, but I am sure that there are several more there that we did not find. We’ll look for them before we head north. As it is, we will probably miss some of them.

We plan to leave tomorrow, but tonight is special. Ann and Samson have announced that they consider themselves to be married, so they will be sleeping together. We have decided that we cannot prevent the coupling, and their age is the only barrier as far as we are concerned, so we will celebrate with them.

*********

Okay, we are just leaving Vandenberg on our way north. So far, there has been no sign that the ETs are aware of us destroying their fog machines. Dammit, how much longer is that going to last. It certainly is convenient that all we have to do is to walk up to a fog machine and start shooting, but I am getting very antsy to find at least one ET.

I want to make it easy to find us, so we are going to follow Highway 101 as much as we can. We may be forced off it if it should be blocked by too many empty cars, but we won’t know until we try it. By staying on that highway, we hope to get the ETs to try to ambush us. That may be a very dumb idea, but we have no real alternatives. As a sort of insurance, Ann is keeping a schedule by radio with Nathaniel back at home so they will know where we are. Nathaniel will leave the receiver on all of the time so that Ann can report it if we are attacked.

We got our first response to our destruction about 75 miles south of San Francisco. We found an undamaged fog machine, and it was Samson’s turn to shoot it. Somehow, he must have triggered an alarm because the machine started to spout fog from the nozzles. I wanted to try something, so I yelled at him not to shoot, and I grabbed up the flame thrower and had Bob help me to put it on.

I ran close to the fog machine and sprayed it with burning napalm. To my delight, that destroyed all of the fog that had been deployed. Okay, that answered my question of how to fight the fog. I yelled at Samson to destroy the machine after I had backed away a little bit. He looked like he especially enjoyed shooting the fog machine, and he got a big kiss from Ann when he got back to the RV. Bob drove us away as Ann helped me to take off the flame thrower.

It was obvious when the fog machine exploded that its fuel tanks were full. That meant that either it was a new installation or the ETs had recharged the tanks. Either way, we knew that we had to be close to finding them.

After that instance, nearly every fog machine that we destroyed started to spout fog as soon as a person got close. Those machines all had full storage tanks, so we had to be telling the ETs where to find us. We destroyed four more of the fog machines before the ETs upped the ante.

This time, it was my turn to shoot the fog machine, and I was expecting some sort of action from it when I got close. At a point of fairly close approach, I heard what sounded like a mortar firing. I recognized the noise from my Army days, so I turned and ran back toward the RV.

When the mortar bomb landed, there was no major explosion. Instead, there was the sound that a dropped watermelon makes when it hits the ground. Out of the impact point there spewed what looked like more of the white fog. Samson grabbed up the flame thrower and covered the source of the fog with flame. That killed the fog, and I stopped running. The range was kind of long, but I opened fire on the fog machine with HEAT rounds from my AA-12. It took more rounds than we had previously been using, but the fog machine was destroyed. Hell, I said that the range was long, and I missed with a few of the shots. So, sue me.

We had no idea if there were more of the fog mortars, so we got the hell out of there. None of us had any idea of how to find out if there were more of the mortars still left, so we reluctantly left the scene. However, we did learn not to be so complacent when we found another fog machine.