Chapter 25

Friday December 21^st was our final carved in stone 'be done!' date. I mentally wasn't predicting the EMP until Sunday the 23^rd, but the 21^st was the traditional EOTW date set by the Mayans and when most of the 'we're all going to die' internet hysteria seemed to be taking place. All of our computer equipment was disconnected and stored now except for one old laptop with a slow wifi card that I'd decided to sacrifice. We had up to a couple of days now to wait, in primitive semi-isolation, more or less, and I wanted to keep a sharp finger on the pulse of the news.

Thursday, that original collection of maverick Italian solar scientists had released another statement that they were predicting record solar activity to occur during the next week. As usual, most other observatories didn't agree with their data, until NASA's own solar storm warning unit on Friday released a quiet news release that in fact the sun might be reaching an 'unusual solar maximum period'. An hour later Drudge Report posted a similar finding from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), but while both sources agreed that the current solar storm activity was indeed very unusual, no one felt there was any cause for concern.

Lucy knew otherwise. It looked like the young gal was going to be dead accurate once again, as always. I'd even begun to hope that this was all some terrible mistake or misunderstanding, but in my heart I knew better. By Friday night even the optimist solar scientists were having second thoughts and one or two observatories were even using the phrase 'potential Carrington level event'. Solar storms, like big massive X-class plasma flares can move at millions of miles per hour and early warning of solar storm events is difficult at best...

Not even Drudge was warning the world yet to climb into our sealed bunkers, but by Saturday morning the collection of sun photos showing massive sunspot activity was unmistakable. Since solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME's) are essentially undetectable until within a few hours of arrival, and CME's can take up to a day or two to actually arrive, this likely meant that our current Cenozoic period extinction level event was now immanent. Just like most of life after the Permian period, not to mention the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, a big chunk of life on earth was now going to get shuffled off of the table and be replaced by a new deck of playing cards, with probably a lot of new players, eventually.

Saturday morning we'd all taken one last trip to the doctors to get quick checkups and boosters for every shot imaginable. We'd made the appointments a couple of weeks ago and we'd told the doc we were all thinking about a Mexican and Central American camping and road-trip off from civilization, so immunize us against everything they could think of, and they did. Getting TTD, tetanus-typhoid-diphtheria, always give me flu-like symptoms for the next two days so already I wasn't enjoying my last few hours of modern civilized life, but I couldn't go back to bed ... too much shit still to do!

We made it back to the village on schedule just before noon so I couldn't park my sore needle poked ass, as it was time to make one last big public rah-rah speech before the lights went off. No one would ever be able to say that I didn't warn them!

Earlier in the morning before we'd left for the clinic, I'd told Garry that the game was now afoot, and to get his police officers going door to door to gather up, or at least inform everyone nicely, that I'd be holding a brief emergency village meeting at high noon. I figured I'd get everyone together for about the last time under normal conditions of civilization and hold one last 'Come to Jesus' assembly, and probably play the role of the crazed Old Testament prophet for the very last time. Well, it worked and surprisingly we had a pretty good standing room only turn out, complete with a bunch of the kiddies too. Mom and Dad probably figured it would be educational showing their off-spring what a crazed kook and lunatic (and their elected official) looked like in the wild.

Keeping Austin Weird™ on some days is so pathetically simple and easy that a caveman could probably do it ... and get reelected to the state legislature by wide margins too!

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and children of all ages, get ready ... for the show is about to begin! Just to demonstrate that I might not be the craziest fool in this room, I'd like to quickly start off this extremely short meeting to point out that at least five major news sources and one official government agency, the NCAR, have publicly suggested already this morning that a Carrington level X-class solar flare is not only possible during the next 12 to 48 hours, but is in fact entirely now likely, or even probable. X-class flares are as big as they get, boys and girls. Big, dangerous and potentially technology destroying, easily capable of bringing down the entire national electrical grid for weeks or months. Bigger than the Montreal storm of 1989 that shut down that the city. This one will be worse they say, perhaps even worse than you can imagine. In any case, in the interest of preserving the health, safety and happiness of our residents, I as your mayor and the other members of the village council would like to very strongly suggest that the second this meeting is adjourned, which will be less than five minutes from now, that you all dash into your cars and safely but promptly head to our local Kroger's, H.E.B. and/or Wal-Mart and stock up on cans and boxes. Bottled drinks are good too, but don't concern yourself much with items that require either refrigeration or are frozen. They're predicting that the power not only might go out, but could likely be permanently impacted by the storm, so use ice chests instead for anything that must be kept chilled. Also, refill your prescription medicines, if you have any. Just suggesting..." Fortunately, except for birth control, which was now moot, none of our family needed any, or at least yet.

I stopped for breath and received about a hundred questions, most of which I couldn't (or didn't want to) answer. For now I was sticking with what was being reported on the internet, not what a certain then seventeen year old mystic had told me on a beach about three months ago. I was trying to keep it simple, fairly factual, and non-weird ... or at least as far as possible.

When the questions just didn't stop, I had to find a way to get this meeting finished and everyone off, preferably shopping. Bribery usually always works, but it's rare that it's the mayor giving the payments and not receiving them under the table. At least I was very upfront about this.

"One last tidbit folks and then me and mine are off to the stores, with or without you! Having no power, possibly for months, also means no ATM machines, debit cards or even credit card transactions. Hell, the only info that your bank has about you and your account is all in computers, ones and zeros on some computer that probably will never boot up again after this is over. Thinking cautiously, If I were you, I'd grab your cash with both hands and spend it all today, this afternoon, now, upon things that might have some future value to you and your family. Things like canned food, a few can-openers, some changes of clothes, and a few blankets. Getting a few extra ice chests would be clever too. And pet food. My family didn't get any, other than for Anne-Marie's rather old cat, so if you've got a cat or dog, parrot or goldfish, you'd better plan today how to feed it after tomorrow or how you're going to cook it instead. Just some helpful advice. Now to be rather more helpful, if some folks want to come shopping with us, coming along in one of the old schoolbuses we recently picked up, then I'll spot you each $500 extra bonus cash from out of my own pocket, just for you to help us grab some more boxes and cans for a village emergency food supply. That'll pay for a cart or two of stuff extra for you, and for us as well. Win-win for everyone! Now I declare this meeting adjourned. If you still have questions, we're going to Kroger's first in about fifteen minutes. Now wake up people! It's time to shop! And kids, get those last final 'Happy Meals' now, because the drive-up burger business will probably be gone forever after tomorrow too."

The offer of $500 each to come and shop until we all dropped worked like a charm, and not too long later our collection of four old diesel buses, including the double-decker and 'One-Eyed Willie' as well were all off to the grocery stores with pretty much every seat filled. The rest took their own cars and for the most part everyone was concerned enough by the early panic to now to at least 'stock up a bit', if not quite assist us in emptying the shelves. The stores were a bit more crowded than usual, but not excessive so. The panic hadn't begun yet, and the shelves were more or less adequately stocked.

Sure, we already had most of our primary survival food supplies now, enough to last at least a decade or two now, but we still had a bit of DD's petty cash left, about $400,000 or so, and we were trying to spend every last penny of it today that we could. Boxes and can of food bought today were a priceless investment for the future and this afternoon was the end of any reasonable safe period. After sunset tonight we were on borrowed time. Maybe doomsday wouldn't come until Sunday night, but we couldn't count on it.

Spending money like there was no tomorrow, wasn't just a euphemism today! Even handing out money like a drunken sailor on shore leave didn't get the last of DD's pile of petty cash entirely spent. When we quit at 6:30 p.m., already an hour after sunset, we were still $120,000 dollars left in the green. Our attempt to go 'Brewster's Millions' and spend it all to the very last penny failed, but it was fun trying!

Well, there would always be some idiot over the next few weeks that would believe that the lights were going to come back on tomorrow or the day afterwards, and that everything would again be just the way things were. I used to be one of those sorts of overly optimistic people. Now, in acceptance of the 'greater fool' theory, we could trade these soon to be worthless paper dollars for useful stuff over the next few weeks. Or else, they might still eventually have value as toilet paper. That was going to be a real laugher someday.

Arriving back home just before 7 p.m., I grilled the fresh porterhouse steaks I had gotten from H.E.B. while listening to the local news radio station and starting in heavily on a couple dozen cases of beer we'd iced down into the porch sauna. It's motors and pumps were underground, but it make for a nice huge ice bucket. We ate and kept listening to the radio and I also kept refreshing the webpages of Drudge, CNN, NASA and also the BBC. Waiting for news or just plain waiting. We all ended up sitting upon the porch, mostly in silence. Waiting impatiently for the worst news any of us had ever received in our lifetime, and becoming increasing edgy and nervous.

We didn't have anything of a precise timeframe other than that night would turn to day. That meant that we could be sitting here all night ... or even tomorrow night as well, wondering if Lucy's psychic brain had at last had some sort of electrical malfunction and that doomsdaydoomsday might be at least postponed. I ought to have been hopeful for something like this, but my heart really knew otherwise.

It was the final countdown, but we just didn't know what the D-day and H-hour were. And so, for lack of anything more interesting to do, we just continued to sit and wait. All of our preparations had been completed and no one wanted to look 'just one more time' at our 6" binder full of checklists and 'to-do' lists. We'd covered each page twice – everything done and check marked. Twice.

Worried about potentialities, at about eight o'clock we sent all of the women (especially the pregnant ones) indoors and down the steep steps of the manhole sized passage to the Secret Garden. In the hallway just before the grow room we had laid out some air mattresses, blankets and a pair of LED lanterns for light. They wanted to see the coming light show, obviously, but no one was too sure just how much microwave radiation anyone upstairs, and out in the open and exposed would get hit by. The guys had our radiation shielding suits and were game for an evening of drinking beer on the deck to wait for the Greatest Show on Earth to begin, the near extinction of the human race. Definitely an evening to tell the grandkids about.

At just about the dot of nine o'clock, NASA's web page updated to report that they had detected an extremely large solar electromagnetic pulse (our long awaited EMP) with the annotation that a large coronal mass ejection was likely directly behind it, arrival time unknown. The flare was calculated to be an extreme X-class, several times stronger it was estimated than the largest previous known flare a few years ago that had been calculated as being X-45. Loaded with photons and highly charged matter, it was going to blast the planet's ionosphere and geomagnetic field creating a massive aurora borealis that was predicted to be visible as far south as Mexico.

Actually, our loveable NASA eggheads were off just a little bit, as our cheap old radio suddenly died out and the skies above us burned with colors until night did indeed turn itself quite nearly into day ... but a full three minutes early, at 9:17 p.m.

During those intervening minutes I made one last phone call to a retired NASA astronaut still living in Houston. Mom had his phone number in her head memorized and she even dialed the number for me and made the brief introductions, and until the phone went dead in my hand about fifteen minutes later I was at least now able to speak with the man who had sired me, my real father. We didn't have long to speak, but Lucy was right. He was indeed proud of me, and I in turn was now proud to call him 'Father', something I could never do with my late stepfather.

It was nearly all too late, but by the time the phone system suddenly died, I had finally found that one little bit of inner peace that had always evaded me up until now. I truly did have a father, and he loved me ... and I loved him! The last thing that she said to me was that he was going to get into his car now and come drive to see me, but trapped that moment as the massive EMP struck I doubted that he was ever able to leave, unless he had an old Corvette still in his garage. In any case, he didn't arrive. I always held out hope that he would straggle in here someday on foot. My father was considered one of, if not the smartest man in the entire astronaut program. If there was a way to survive, he'd have found it.

And then the lights went out, everywhere around out, here in the village and in south Austin, and in fact all over the world, and except for at a few well prepared isolated places

Every streetlight was out in the village and for a hundred miles or more around us. Taking flashlights in hand, retrieved from a shallow buried ammo case on the law, together us guys all climbed up to the top of the hill behind our house where the massive windfarm pole stood empty and waiting for its motor and rotors, and we looked north up across the river toward Austin, seeing nothing but stark black darkness illuminated by the aurora borealis above. Watching the aurora shimmer and roll southward like a rippling bright tide, I was also pretty sure that this particular lightshow caused by the enormous EMP pulse ravishing our ionosphere, ozone layer (now probably toast) and perhaps even disrupting of the massively radioactive Van Allen belts above that. That last fear was our biggest concern, and the reason we'd bought and donned the silly space suits! My father would have laughed himself silly at the sight of us, but we were being extra cautious.

Thinking about all of that microwave energy and even solar radiation started to make us a bit nervous, even with the rad suits on, so we took a last 360 degree look around and saw nothing but a sky on fire shining upon a dark, apparently lifeless world below us, but that was of course just our imagination.

The lights had gone off everywhere, and to stay. Except for isolated places where the survivors had planned against this disaster, like Lovett, Texas and of course our Ranger Heights Village, from this moment onward we would once again live in a world only lit by fire.

I think we had only stayed outside on the top of the hills for at most ten minutes but that was enough. None of us were really worried about the possible microwave radiation from the light show above, which was now starting to dissipate, but we wanted to be overly cautious. An ounce of prevention being better than a pound of cure, and all that. It was the darkness all around us that was quickly too disturbing to contemplate any further this night. We were all used to the city being lit up and positively glowing at night with enough light pollution to hardly be able to make out a handful of stars in the sky at all. But as the massive aurora borealis began to fade the rest of the entire universe was now starting to be revealed above us. Stars that I'd never seen before in my life were unveiled like a great glowing carpet around us in all directions, hitherto unseen and virtually unknown to most people outside of a picture book or television.

The reality was much too much, even for a small dose. The night had taken back our world and revealed us all for what we really were ... small and utterly insignificant ... and unbelievably vulnerable!

"Garry, Lump ... I just had an awful, awful thought." I said as we were taking off our probably unnecessary suits in the dining room as we reentered our darkened powerless house. "We're up here on one of the largest hills of south Austin and we could clearly see beyond the river that there wasn't a light for miles, right?" They agreed.

"Oh, I see your point." Garry groaned. "If or when we start lighting ourselves up at night, everyone for miles is going to see us ... and home in on us like moths to a porchlight. The good folks, the bad ... and the really ugly too!"

"Exactly. We're going to draw trouble fast ... sooner than we can deal with it. We still need to get the power restored, from the windfarm and the solar arrays, especially the roof ones for the house, but we've got to keep the main street lights off and minimize all other housing lighting. Blackout curtains, I think ... just like during World War Two. We've got to hide our lights under that biblical bushel for awhile, at least until we have more than eight armed police officers to stop everyone outside the fence from charging in thinking that we're going to feed them all!"

That also meant keeping a low radio profile. To just listen for the next few weeks rather than transmitting much, especially on a public accessible band like AM radio. We could do that sort of stuff later, when our security was better established, but right now if a thousand (or ten) hungry scared refugees tried to swarm our village, we wouldn't have a prayer at stopping them!

Another problem to deal with tomorrow!

Besides, now that the aurora effect was mostly over and the night was rapidly turning as black as ink, it was time to get off of our butts and start on page one of our post-EOTW binder, which listed in priority order about two hundred things that all needed to be done immediately once the lights went out. Now they were gone ... but we didn't have time to mourn for their loss right now!

"Wake up, ladies! It's time to shop! The light show's over and it's getting as black as a landlords heart outside. Time to get going!" I cheerfully called down the access manhole to the Secret Garden from my study. Amy and Kathy both gave me a pair of loud groans, as they'd only just gotten to sleep, but they were already dressed and ready to go, and climbing up one by one the women all returned upstairs and outside to join us for our first major scavenging operation. A daring raid upon at least three of the pharmacies where Anne-Marie had worked, off and on over the last few years.

I'd mentioned that even after we discovered at long last the hidden riches of the Secret Garden that Anne had kept her pharmacist job, but had significantly decreased her working hours to just part-time, two days a week. This had all been part of our long term plan once we'd learned that electronic based civilization was about to receive that hard kick back to the dawn of the industrial era, if not the dark ages! By keeping her job now part time, Anne-Marie had been working 'float', doing relief shifts at different branches of the national pharmacy chain that she'd worked for about a decade. This gave her knowledge of their standard operating procedures and more importantly, let her keep her set of building keys. She also knew where the secure 'controlled drugs' cabinet keys were kept, and she had a set that she thought would fit at nearly every location. Probably very poor corporate security, but they tended to buy their locks in bulk, and nearly all of the same tumbler pattern so that a manager from store #487 could on short notice drive over to store #293 and unlock it in the morning for business. The pharmacy department locks were similarly configured and Anne was 90% that her own collection of assembled store main door and pharmacy department security keys would all likely fit, but we'd brought a pair of Halligan titanium crowbars that could force any locks that her keys wouldn't fit.

With no electrical power and no cellular service, the fairly high grade electronic alarm system would be useless. This would give us time to get in and out, and take for the village anything we thought we could use or eventually need. Admittedly, Anne needed a little convincing originally to agree that once the lights went out forever, that drug stores (especially the big national chains) were going to be one of the very first targets for looters, therefore it was only prudent that we advance ourselves to the front of the line and plunder them early, as soon as possible within a hour or two after the blackout began.

Besides, I reminded her, it wasn't like they'd ever reopen for business ever again. We had just as much of a moral right to the drugs and medicines as Joe Crackhead and his gang of street thugs did, if not more! And we'd certainly put everything to a much more beneficial use.

The first page of the 'What the Fuck to Do when the SHTF?' manual was to check over our new collection of EMP-proof vehicles to make certain that we had at least a few working sets of wheels. Sure, the so called experts had all advised us that our electronic-free diesel trucks and vans would all survive any massive EMP, but this very logical assumption had never before been field tested. Now it time to see if the experts had been right, and to our relief they were. All of the trucks and the two police vans started up on the first turn of their keys.

Now we'd likely be the only vehicles on the road, except for the cars that had shorted out and stalled forever on the roads when the EMP had struck at 9:17. Unfortunately, Saturday night traffic in Austin can be ugly at times, but we could move any vehicle stuck blocking the roadway if we needed to. My new workhorse, the powerful 1977 Silverado had a heavily reinforced steel crashbar on the front that we could use to push anything up to an eighteen wheeled semi off of the road, and it was needed.

Dressed like burglars all in black from head to toe, we climbed into the trucks and vans and our first great raid for plunder began! I was driving lead in the Silverado with Amy to clear the path for everyone else behind us. We were both armed but hoped that if we ran into trouble that we could just wave the weapons around and not need to actually shoot at anyone. Everyone else was in either one of the pickup trucks or the two old vans we'd bought for the police department, but we had no one outside of our little family band involved in this first caper.

This particular bit of looting wasn't terribly honorable either, but it was much better for everyone if we could 'rescue' these needed emergency supplies before the real looters got around to clearing the drug stores out themselves.

It was eerie driving at night without a single street or house light to help guide your way. Despite the now abundant stars, the moon was just a sliver tonight and nearly from the start of our trip I was regretful that I hadn't put on a pair of night vision goggles to help me see the roadway ahead. We had bought quite a few pairs from Colonel Blimp and there were all downstairs somewhere in a box ... which didn't help us one bit right now.

Along the county road going east there hadn't been too many cars on the road that had been trapped by the EMP but I did have to push four or five cars out of the way at various intersections, where they had been stuck waiting for the signal light when the pulse hit. Surprising, nearly now an hour later, quite a few owners of the stalled and permanently immobile cars were still either with their vehicles or hanging around nearby. With no signals on their cell phones, no lights and a dead car, I suppose a lot of people were then inclined to just wait for help or rescue. Unfortunately, than plan was a bit too optimistic for the new world conditions.

A few people were willing when pressured (or threatened with brandished handguns) to put their cars into neutral and push them out of the way themselves, others decided that they had the right to keep blocking the roadway and either had to be pushed by me forcibly out of the way or needed to be coerced by the firing a warning shot from my .45 pistol to get their heads out of their asses ... and their junker out of my way!

One enterprising idiot decided that since I had the only working vehicle for miles, that he then had a perfect right to take it for his own. Probably a moron from the nearby section 8 apartment houses a few blocks further ahead. He came running around in the road in front of me to make me stop, waving his 9mm pistol at me to get my attention, and he got it. I sped up and ran the bastard over. I think the crash bar crushed his head and chest, but the wheels certainly took care of the rest.

Well, with Amy in the passenger seat I wasn't going to stop and argue with him or even start a gun fight if I could help it. She clinched her teeth but didn't say a word. She knew that we were now living in a darker and grittier world and that we had to fight now to preserve and protect what was ours. Charity and patience with crackhead idiots was a lot less important now than security.

Our first drug store location, nearby on the feeder road of I-35, was like every other building for hundreds of miles, dark and lifeless. Normally this branch store would have been open 24 hours a day, but with the severity of the power outage the building had been locked and the employees had all left and started to walk home. Anne-Marie's key fit the door and in a moment we had the entire place to ourselves.

As dark as it was outside, we still tried to avoid attention and we parked our row of trucks and van around by the back loading door. The alarms were all dead, as was the cellular backup alert. No police would be coming, even assuming that they had drivable vehicles to even get here!

We had a plan for scavenging and everyone knew their roles, so we each grabbed a big contractor sized plastic trash bag and we hit our assigned departments. Anne-Marie unlocked the pharmacy doors and the controlled drugs cabinet and she, Amy and I just swept everything from the counters and shelves into the large sturdy plastic trash bags without even looking at their contents. Katherine was doing the same outside clearing out the public 'over the counter' medications shelves, and Ella was nearby doing the same for the vitamins. Lori was assigned the task of grabbing the non-drug related medical supplies but she was movingly slowly tonight, being rather out of sorts she claimed by the psychological hit of the world really and actually coming to something of an end.

Garry, Lumpy, Jason, Gabe and Libby were covering the rest of the stores' isles, grabbing snack foods, picnic supplies, ice chests and even cigarettes. None of us smoked (other than an occasional cigar) but cartons of tobacco would make excellent and reliable trade goods for the future. Also the limited selection of bottled wines was too valuable to consider leaving in any case, not to mention the numerous six packs and cases of beer.

When looting, everything takes twice as long as you'd expect, especially when you're mostly in the dark and trying to hold a flashlight in one hand, a sack in another hand and trying to use your elbows and noses to shove loot into your sack. The small LED flashlights we'd brought could be held in the mouth to free up hands, but it was a bit crazed. We'd budgeted no more than twenty minutes of looting here, but to do a thorough job it took us closer to forty-five minutes instead. No one bothered us and when we left, the store was largely stripped clean but we left the front doors wedged open so that others could glean some loot of their own after we'd gone.