Sabre dancing with the Dead Ch 12.
18:34 April 17, 20xx
Day 4
The convoy of 3 APCs and the truck were on their way back to the compound after two successful supply missions. Time to get home and secure for the night. The Komatsu, with Wolf at the wheel was slotted in as number 2 in the line, and they were boogieing right along at 25mph. Wolf had already radioed for someone to start the diversionary noise making to get the gate cleared of critters. Everything was going according to plan.
And then things went pear shaped in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, the truck's instrument panel went dead and the engine died. At the same instant, a second sun burst forth high and to the east, back over the hills surrounding Tokanosu City. Since they were heading along the shore road, the second sun lit them up from one side, as the setting sun lit them from the other. Very confusing. As the truck coasted to a stop, Wolf snatched up the radio to check with Wally and found it dead. Then he noticed all the street lights, and traffic lights were also dead. Beginning to get an idea, he glanced down at his digital watch. It too was dead. Gradually the realization of what had just happened came to him.
As a doomer from way back when, It seemed pretty obvious to him what had just happened. Someone, somewhere had launched a nuclear warhead up to a very high altitude, say 80-100 miles up and detonated it. The immediate result was a burst of electromagnetic energy of immense power. As the burst radiated outwards, anything electronic that it touched died instantly. Control systems for power generators, radios, wrist watches, cell phones, computers, and electronic dashboards all used integrated circuitry to work. All those IC chips were now just so much crystalline garbage. Their ability to function had forever died when the radiation overloaded them and fried them to a crisp. Everything shut down. Permanently.
The only way to fix something electronic now would be to replace the parts that fried. In some cases, this would be a cinch if the parts were on hand and OK. An alternator for instance, nowadays had the diodes on a removable card. If you had a new card and the windings weren't burnt out, you could fix it. In other cases, not a hope in hell as every new part put in to repair a damaged board had to be balanced with all the other parts or the board wouldn't work. A radio for instance. Each part of the circuit had to balance against the other parts in terms of resistance, capacitance and impedance. With all the test gear cooked as well there was no way to tune in a circuit to make it work. Every standard component out there had a tolerance of 10% regarding its value. So for instance a resister could be labeled 100 ohm, and run between 90 and 110 ohms. Really good ones were within 5% of the marked value. There in lay the problem. As said, not a chance in hell.
The APC behind him pulled up along side. Dave Courtney climbed out of the top hatch and hollered over. "Are you OK? What happened?
The truck just died. So did my radio and my watch. Do you have radio still? Wolf called back to him.
Dave ducked down inside, and popped up a few seconds later. "Yeah, the set is lit, and I'm getting static and some faint voice but I can't understand it, it's garbled and in Japanese I think."
"Yeah, See if you can get Wally on the radio. I suspect everything is dead now. Wolf grumbled.
"You'd best jump over here man, them critters is getting close." Dave told him.
Wolf looked back up the road and sure enough there were a couple of dozen shuffling along. Time to bail out. He grabbed his coat and the rest of his gear and jumped from the boarding steps over to the top of the APC. "Ok, lets head for the gate. That'll be our next problem. In hind sight, maybe smearing all those stairs might not have been such a bright idea after all." He said, as Dave put the APC in gear and started to move again.
Minutes later they were outside the compound. Wally was standing up on the platform and hollered over that the gate was dead. They'd have to use the manual override, which would take a while. He wanted to know how they planned on keeping the critters away from the gate.
Wolf told all the drivers to shut down. Then he told Wally to get a couple of horns and batteries and place them on the wall at the far end of the compound. That was a couple hundred yards away from the gate at this end. "Wally, once you get the stuff up onto the wall, hook up a horn and let her rip. As soon as they all move over there you can open the gate a bit so we can get in. If we do it right, they won't be able to do anything before we get the gate closed again. We'll have to leave the APCs outside for now until we figure out a way to get power back to the gate. Just keep that horn blaring, OK?"
Then he looked over at the other two APCs where several heads were showing above the over head hatches. "Ok everyone, absolute silence now. No noise at all. Let Wally drag them over to the other end of the wall. Once they are way the hell over there, they'll open the gate a little bit and we will didi right quickly and quietly. Grab you gear and some of the horns and wire as you go. Got it?"
The others all nodded agreement, and settled down to wait. The deaders by this time were within 50 yards of the vehicles. By the time they actually got to them, their interest was waning as there was no longer any noise to draw them and they milled about waiting on other noises to draw them. They could see Wally and a couple of others now sitting on top of the wall down at the far end, hurriedly hooking up a horn using jumper cables from the battery on the ground to the horn up on the wall. Wally then took one of the cable clamps and connected the circuit and the horn started blaring. Very quickly the deaders turned in that direction and started to shuffle off in that direction.
In the mean while, several people had climbed up onto the stairs at various points and were picking off deaders one at a time. It wasn't really to kill them all, but rather to see if they could actually hit them and kill them with the cross bows. So far that experiment seemed to be working. A head shot would take them down easily and as long as the distance wasn't too great and the bow man could compensate for the lurching motion, they were dropping.
Shinji waved the bow men off the wall after half a dozen deaders had gone down, wanting to save the bolts for later. All they could do was wait til the mass had made it down to the far end. That took about 10 minutes of shuffling and lurching. The deaders all pooled around the wall right under the horn. Wally had by that time dropped off the wall as the racket was deafening. He popped up on the stairs by their gate, checked to see if any of the critters were still within earshot and then signaled someone inside to open the gate. This was done by turning a very large hand wheel attached to a gear train that was powerful enough to shift the door which weighed in at a ton and a half or so. It took time though, and the fear was that they might not get it closed again if the critters came back for some reason. So far that wasn't a problem.
Seeing how slow the gate was moving, Wally had a couple more people latch onto the hand wheel and help. This got the gate moving about half as fast as it did under power. Wolf wondered if they could get a generator to power the gate but suspected it wasn't running on anything less than 240volts. Maybe, maybe not. They would have to check out the system and then see where they could scrounge up a generator. In the mean time the gate had opened up about 5 feet, and he signaled everyone to un-ass the APCs and get into the compound right quickly. Several of the crew took boxes of horns with them and came back out to grab batteries and more cable. Shinji kept an eye on the critters in the fading light, who showed no sign of being aware of the movement by the vehicles. It took 10 minutes to get everything out of the carriers and seal them up again, then Wolf and Shinji were the last ones in the gate. It was already half closed by the time they dropped down and squeezed through.
Once everyone was inside and the gate was closed, Wolf gathered Shinji, Saburo and Wally together off to one side of the crowd now milling around in the parking lot. The sun was down now, the light was fading fast, and the darkness would only be broken by a half moon.
He started off the discussion, asking if they knew what had happened.
Saburo replied "I suspect an EMP pulse from a nuclear detonation. That would be consistent with what I observed and can see the effects of." He turned to look at Wally, their "communications" expert and asked him if he still had any functioning radios on his boat. With that Wally took off to check.
"Shinji, what do you think?" Saburo asked.
"I agree, it was a pulse. My digital watch is dead, and I don't see any electrical items working at all. My cell phone is also dead. It was fully charged last night." Shinji replied, showing them his dead watch. Wolf also held up his which was also dark.
"Ok then, What do we do about it? In terms of our survival I mean. I know that this is a permanent thing now. We have been effectively pushed back to the 19th century, if not further. Plus we are in the middle of a world wide pandemic or what ever you want to call this mess with the dead coming back to life. We need to figure out how to survive without the advantages we had." Wolf asked the others.
Looking over at the club house, he saw Kat come walking out the door and make a beeline right to him.
He warned the others. "Oh Shit, looks like our first problem is coming to us, guys!"
"Hey have you guys got any idea how we can cook without electricity? Or water? We have dinner ready for tonight but without the stoves we are gonna be eating raw food tomorrow morning." She asked them.
"No idea at the moment Kat, that's what we were discussing. What ever we do has to be a long term solution. The power won't be coming on again in our lifetimes as far as I'm concerned." Wolf told her.
"What happened anyway? Is power out all over the city now? Or just here?" She wondered.
"No, We figure the power is off all over the country. Someone popped an EMP burst and zorched everything." Wolf replied.
"You're kidding right? Isn't that science fiction? Movie stuff?" Tamichi Hara asked as he walked over to the group.
"Unfortunately, it's very real. We are back to where we were in the 19th century as far as our living standards are concerned. Right now our immediate problem is how to get fresh water, cook our food and resupply those items. Got any ideas?" Saburo noted.
Shinji scratched his chin, and said "I think we can get water back at my base. There are a couple of water bowsers sitting in one of the tank barns. They should still run as they are shielded. All the vehicles there should still run. Our APCs do. We can also get a field kitchen unit and tow it back here. That will do for the near term, until fuel runs out. I expect eventually we'll be back to wood burning or coal if we can find any."
Tamichi told them about some propane outdoor cooking gear that the club used for barbeques and such during the summer months, which was in storage. He'd pull it out first thing in the am. Propane wise he figured they had several large tanks of it, having just received their first shipment for the summer season. That might take care of the cooking for now. If he set it up under the awning over the outdoor deck, cooking would be possible in all weather.
"We should get everyone to check the boats they are on too. Most of them will likely have propane or alcohol stoves on board, which will do for them to cook on. Again, until the fuel runs out. We should tell them to save it for emergencies. I like Tamichi's idea. Communal cooking is still the best way to get maximum bang for our buck." Wolf told them. "In the mean time I suggest we get to dinner before it ends up cold. It'll be the last decent meal for a while, I'm thinking."
Turning to the crowd, Shinji waved them all into the clubhouse which was now very dark inside. The only light came from the emergency lights and from a dozen storm lanterns someone had dug out and lit. These were placed on various tables and at the serving station. As the people filed in and grabbed some food, they asked the leadership group what they were going to do now. Saburo told them to eat first and they would discuss it after dinner.
Dinner was a sombre affair, everyone quietly conversing with the nearest person, enjoying what they knew now would be their last decent meal for some time. Word of what had happened to the power spread among them like wildfire after Tamichi had told them of his conversation with the 3 leaders.
Dinner concluded, everyone sat up, wanting to know where they were going to go from here. Obviously food, and water were of primary concerns. Shelter not so much as everyone had their boat to sleep in. In fact some of them had already moved upwards to larger quarters as they took over boats that had not been claimed by anyone and had been swept for critters.
Saburo, Wolf and Shinji moved to the bar area, and started to explain just exactly what the situation was, and how it would not be remedied in the foreseeable future. Wolf next asked Wally what the status was of his radio gear. That was bad news, all his gear was smoked. The boat he was in was fibreglass, and did nothing to protect any electronics. So they had no more communications with other groups, unless they could find a working set somewhere. Shinji asked Saeko to make a note to check the Takagi warehouse paperwork to see if there was any radio gear in there that might have survived. Electronics sealed in a steel container might be OK, as the can acted as a Faraday cage and negated the EMP pulse.
The plan to move the propane summer cooking gear out to the patio for cooking was discussed as was the possibility of getting the water bowsers from the JSDF base. Kat and Fujiko asked that everyone on the kitchen crew appear in the kitchen to assist in moving their cooking set up out to the patio. By the time they were ready with that, Tamichi should have the propane gear set up and they could prepare a late breakfast. They also made note of the fact that without cooling, their food supplies would start going bad in short order. So fresh food would be cooked up and eaten as soon as was possible and the meal time diet might look a bit strange for a while.
By 8pm they'd pretty much exhausted any items that needed to be covered, and Saburo told them all to head to their respective boats and crash for the night. Without light, they had just regressed to an older lifestyle in that they would be early to bed and even earlier to rise.
Wolf collected Kat and bid everyone good night. They would check Sabre Dance out in the morning and see if any of their electronics had survived the pulse. That decided, they cast off the dinghy and headed out to the moorings. Above them, the half moon shone on a darkened city, lit only by sporadic fires that still burned.
-Author's notes: I don't own HOTD, or any of its characters. I just get to play in their universe. All characters in this story (So far) are my own.
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Anyone interested in following the progress on the real life Sabre Dance is welcome to visit my builder's blog. Just search for Sabredancing. You'll find it.