SUMMARY: David Reid finds a new home.

WARNINGS: Profanity

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Call it a distraction or a series for when there is no official Jericho. The car is off timeline by a few years but you'll have to overlook it.

--

FEEDBACK POLICY: Whether it is myself or any other author I encourage you to register and leave feedback. It encourages and rewards you and the author. It moves stories that you like back up where people can read them. Constructive comments encourage the writers by letting them know what you liked and disliked. In my case, it allowed audience participation in the writing process. Everybody benefits from good feedback.

--

DISCLAIMER: The name "Jericho" and all character names and trademarks associated with the television program are the intellectual property of Junction Entertainment, Fixed Mark Productions, CBS Paramount Television and/or CBS Studios, Inc. The following stories are works of fan fiction intended solely as an intellectual exercise without profit motive. No infringement of copyright is intended or should be implied.

--

TITLE: REIDVILLE-Hangover In Hell, Chapter 2 of 5

AKA:

STORY TYPE: Alternate Episode with Alternate Characters (Outside of Jericho)

TIMELINE: 200X0930 (Bombs-1)

EPISODE GUIDE: n/a

TUCKERAU GUIDE: n/a

--

--

--SCENE: Loft of David Reid in Reidville, SC

--

David slowly awoke with a pounding head, the taste of death in his mouth and a hand that had fallen asleep during the night as he used it for a pillow. He twisted his head only to expose a crick caused by the rain gutter of the shower. An attempt to open his mouth exposed cottonmouth so bad, that he dare not try the maneuver again without a glass of water in hand.

He rolled over and stared at the nightlight lit ceiling. 'Well let's ask ourselves if last night solved anything? NO!? No surprise there.' He winced in pain.

He then raised his arm up so he could see his watch. Pushing the cottonmouth aside, he cussed aloud, "Of fuck. It's nine. I was supposed to be at work an hour ago."

His head pounded mercilessly as he tried to stand up exposing the symptom of dehydration he had always referred to as 'dry-brain.' So much so that it tried to drive him back to his knees, but after a moment, he steadied himself and headed for the kitchen. He threw open the refrigerator door, grabbed the orange juice and threw back his head chugging the juice. 'Its warm?'

David looked around the kitchen and saw that the clocks had lost seven hours. He didn't know when the power went off, but it was on now. He found it strange because as its planner, he knew that the city of Reidville had a direct tie to the high voltage mains coming from the Oconee nuclear power station. For the power to be off any given time meant the power station or the mains themselves were down. 'More likely something local like a ditch crew cutting an unmarked line,' since a drunk hitting a pole with his car couldn't happen in Reidville where all of the power and communication lines were buried.

He took the orange juice in hand and trudged upstairs to his master bathroom. He stripped off his putrid clothes and jumped in a steaming hot shower. 'At least I have a gas water heater.' He couldn't have taken a cold shower and no shower at all would have driven him back to drinking. He stayed in long enough to shave and work out the kinks in his neck.

After his shower, he went straight to his closet and pulled out a Brooks Brothers blue pinstripe suit tailored to his frame that he bought in the Manhattan flagship store. It was underlay by a starched linen shirt and topped with a wide silk tie. Checking his appearance in his valet's mirror suggested an adjustment to his tie and he slipped on a pair of Italian leather shoes. Taken together it was a three thousand dollar outfit and it was just one of many he owned. It wouldn't fool his secretaries who knew him like his grandmother, but provided him armor for facing the day ahead where everyone else was concerned.

"Car keys… wallet… cash… cell phone." As he went to put the phone in his pocket he checked the mode and realized the ringer was off. After the call from the paper he had turned it off and left in on his dresser. He turned on the ringer and as the mode changed, the screen displayed, '29 calls missed.'

"What the hell?" He hit the speed-dial to check his messages, but the called failed with 'No signal.' David was sating to get unsettled. 'Its got to be tied to the power outage,' but he didn't know how. City Hall couldn't have gone down because of backup generators, but it's possible there was a larger impact on the community.

He tried his house phone but found no dial tone. 'That's three separate and isolated systems.' He folded his jacket over his arm and jogged to his car where he kept his city-issued incident bag.

He skipped the elevator and took the stairs two at a time for three flights. He came out of the stairwell into the basement parking garage at a near run. He ran to a new concept Dodge Challenger. The silver nuevo-muscle car was his anti-beamer in a city overrun with employees from the nearby BMW plant.

While still running to the car, he hits the remote on the car keys to pop the trunk. He reached in and ripped open the day-glo emergency/incident kit feeling for the Motorola radio in it. The radios were purchased using federal 9/11 funds and included the city, EMS, fire and police all on a common radio. He turned on the power and desperately tried all of the channels. He rechecked the battery and the front screen. He even keyed the diagnostics menu, but it reported the radio was 100.

"Oh God… what is going on?"

He threw the 1200 jacket in the truck and carried the radio with him as he jumped in the Challenger. He jammed the key in the ignition and threw the car in reverse. The 425 Hemi threw so much power to the 20 inch wheels that they spun and smoked in the confines of the underground garage. Even before the car stopped its rearward travel, David rammed the transmission forward and the smell of burning rubber filled the car.

As he neared the open garage, his initial panic was tempered by the realization that he was only a mile from the office. Killing himself in a hundred mile an hour crash seemed silly compared to the minute saved and the dozen hours he may already have lost. When he pulled out he looked both ways and used his turn signal. The roads were bare. Not just quiet but devoid of life.

Reidville was designed from the beginning to be pedestrian friendly. While everyone still had one or more cars, it was easy to walk to work or to the store. Each pod or cell development was designed so that the most common needs were within a five minute walk of residences. Normally the Challenger stayed parked, but today his urgency set the car on the prowl. There should have been people walking. Even if the kids were in school, the city's seniors were famous for walking figure eights around the city.

He drove past the mill area coffee shops and grocery store. Doors hung open and the area was strangely silent, but those weren't the only things alarming him. The road and the roofs of houses were coated in a light dusting of snow, except it was four months early for snow in the south. He passed cars but didn't see traffic. There were no signs of life.

Things started to make a little more sense when he noticed the orange flyers floating on the wind. In emergency drills they used cases of orange copy paper to print out emergency flyers. He debating on stopping but he was only a minute from City Hall. The downtown area looked like a ghost town as he parking in front of the building.

He hesitated for a minute before getting out of the car. He walked fifteen feet across the dusting of snow or ash before bending down to pick up one of the flyers.

--

MANDATORY EVACUATION ORDER

DUE TO THREAT OF NUCLEAR FALLOUT

DESTINATION – KNOXVILLE, TN

PRIMARY ROUTES – I85N to I26W to I40W

--

"WHAT THE FUCK!"

David had been thinking a gas leak or industrial accident. He looked the flyer over and while it contained a small map, it gave no indication of why or where the fallout was originating. Given the power outage he considered the idea that the nuclear plant had melted down, but given that the power was back on that seemed likely. Knoxville was also an issue because Charlotte, Columbia and Atlanta were all closer.

'Nuclear fallout? What the hell am I doing?' He looked around at the snow-like dust coating everything around him. He knelt down and rubbed it between his fingers. It wasn't any snow or ice and it disintegrated like flue ash. "I'm standing in fallout. I'm covered in radioactive nuclear waste." He froze not knowing what to do. It just wasn't a situation he had planned on when he started drinking last night.

As he thought, his first instinct was to get back in the car and drive like hell. Every moment he stayed here, he was absorbing more and more radiation. He knew what radiation sickness could do and that wasn't a way to die.

His second impulse was to get back in the car and run home where he still had five bottles left in the last case of whiskey he's bought. He could take off his suit, throw on some sweats and let the alcohol kill him first. It felt and sounded a lot better than bleeding pustules and pulling his hair out while his innards were microwaved by the radiation from the fallout. Pickled just sounded better than cooked.

David actually became distress to the point where he stopped and leaned against his car while fallout slowly rained down around him. 'It does look more like rain… particles are too heavy to look like snow. I man if it was a ground level nuke it would throw millions of tons of irradiated dirt into the air.'

Thankfully that anal-retentive, analytical side took over and it meant that he might live to see another day. 'Look on the good side… I won't be the major news story tomorrow.'

That led him to consider his options. To start that process he had to know what was going on. He needed to know what he knew and what he didn't know and he need time to determine both.

He realized his one strength might lie in what he knew. He was in the middle of the city he designed, built and paid for. There wasn't a nail in a board that he didn't spec, buy and pay to have hammered in. What made him such a powerful administrator was his complete knowledge. He insisted on reviewing every purchase order and understanding every project or plan.

'The multi-purpose room.'

He jumped back in his car and drove it to the parking garage behind the city hall. While his destination was in the basement and tracking fallout throughout the building might be an issue later. Instead he drove into the sub-floor of the garage protecting his car from further fallout and bringing him to the lower rear entrance. He parked near the glass doors but did not use them. Instead he pulled out his master key and approached a double metal door labeled maintenance. It was only opened once or twice a year.

Here in the cover of the garage, was the auxiliary entrance to the multipurpose room used only during drills or real emergencies. Given his drunken ignorance of the approaching nuclear winter and its mandatory evacuation, he felt it now qualified as an emergency. The City of Reidville used the multipurpose room for everything from open town hall meetings to hosting the local science fair to sponsoring the prom. With all of the municipal purposes for the multipurpose room, many would be surprised to find it was bought and paid for with 9/11 funds.

The multipurpose room was the first purpose-built fallout shelter since the 1960s. While many old shelters were re-registered after 9/11, this was the first, and to David's knowledge, the only new construction in the United States. The idea of civil defense had grown so antiquated in the U.S. by 2000, that when he wrote the proposal he had to go to Switzerland where the government has committed to have shelters for 100 of its population by law. Once the Swiss were involved it was a simple cut and paste of a design they used every day in their own civic buildings.

That isn't to say that David is a survivalist or an end-of-the-world freak. After twenty years in real estate, development and politics you can't help but learn where the cash cows reside in the barn. He used state and federal funding every chance he got. When the town of Reidville still qualified as 'rural' they ran electric and water lines using government grants. They built roads, schools and buildings for the City of Reidville. They hired teachers, policemen and firemen using government funds. The U.S. tax payers might be surprised and subtly horrified to learn that they bought, paid for and delivered everything from garbage trucks to armored personnel carriers to the city at a time when the city had surpluses in their budgets.

David needed money to build city hall, a fire department and a police department. The glut of guilt money thrown out at the country following 9/11 paid for more than half of them all. In the case of the multipurpose room, the government provided 377 for each existing resident and 126 for each resident projected within the next ten years. As long as he could call it a fallout shelter he could get almost 10,000,000 to build his municipal buildings. Never one to welch on a deal, he determined that if it had to be a fallout shelter, it would be the best one it could be so that no one could come back later and say he defrauded the government.

When he popped open the heavy metal door, it was the first time in four months it had been opened. It opened it a stark white hallway light by fluorescent bulbs. To a knowledgeable eye, the sealed floors and epoxy painted walls would remind them of a hospital operating room where the entire room could be hosed down if need be. There was not a single pore or crevice available for contaminants to hide.

The hallway had two side doors and one large metal door at the end. The door at the end was only opened for moving large items in and out of the room. It was never used during an emergency. In an emergency, like a nuclear, biological or chemical emergency, people would be forced to enter through the men's and women's locker rooms. Ordinary in appearance, they too were painted and sealed specially. David learned through an exercise last year that people would enter through the back of the locker rooms directly into the showers. Anyone showing signs of contamination would be stripped and showered before being issued new clothes. Only then were they admitted to the shelter.

David spoke to no one as the lights flickered on, "Well I don't have any doubt I'm contaminated."

He discarded his clothes in the corner and scrubbed down in a long hot shower. With pictures of radiation poisoning still fresh in his mind professionals couldn't have done it better. He scrubbed his face and neck until they were raw and then did the same for his hands. Going back to his city issued duffle, he pulled out fresh jeans and hikers.

He walked from the showers, through the locker rooms and up to the entrance to the multipurpose room. On one side it looked like a seminar was setting up and on the other was a church or school fair. The multipurpose room was a single open space larger than most airplane hangars. If he remembered correctly there was room and supplies for two thousand if they pulled out the chairs and people only stayed the night. On the other end of the spectrum, it could be locked down from the outside world in which case there was living space and food to last 200 people 60 days. Of course if no one else showed up then it could sustain one person for forty years… theoretically.