Clouds
Mike's suggestion had kindled a new hope in every one of us.
Finishing the cargo nets and fabricating and mounting the jerrycan holders was going to take a fair amount of time, so we had no choice but to stay at the farm two or three days longer than planned.
From the next day on, the farm became a sprawling workshop and a training ground.
Dave, Frank, and Mike lived in grease from dawn to dusk. They stripped every usable part off the gang's wrecked trucks, then built jerrycan holders from pipe and steel plate and welded them onto the sides of the vehicles.
Whenever he could spare a moment, Gunner stepped in as firearms instructor. Dave and Frank joined the training, of course — and so did Frank's wife, Sarah, and Liam, his son, who had just turned seventeen. Sarah, who had been afraid of guns at first, grew comfortable with them in no time, and Liam, if anything, looked like he was having the time of his life.
As for me, I went looking for Cyrus, the farm's owner, for a project of my own.
"You wouldn't happen to have any steel pipe on the farm with an inner diameter of 18.5 millimeters?"
Cyrus nodded at the question.
"Got more'n I know what to do with. Want 'em cut to about ten inches? How many you needin'?"
"How'd you know what I'm using them for?"
"Hell, I could tell at a glance. You're buildin' yourself a twelve-gauge launcher, ain't ya?"
"That's right."
"Think you could do about thirty?"
"As many as you want."
What I had in mind was a remotely triggered shotgun trap, something in the vein of a Claymore. The tripwires were essentially one-and-done, and more to the point, there was no way to fire the ones mounted on the trailer from the driver's seat.
So I started gathering parts, one piece at a time.
On the dashboard of one of the gang's wrecked trucks I found a switch box with a red cover, the kind that looked like a missile-launch button, and asked Frank to pull it for me.
Once I had everything, I laid it out on the workbench inside the trailer and got to work. I took a buckshot shell and, at the very end — the metal base where the primer sat — drilled a small hole with a hand drill. Then I fed two thin wires into the opening, pushing them in until they made direct contact with the powder charge inside.
The principle was simple. Press the switch, send current from the battery, and the spark at the wire tips would ignite the powder and fire the shell. The problem was voltage — how much it would take for a reliable ignition. I had no idea.
I took the steel pipe Cyrus had cut for me and started testing in a corner of the front yard. I seated a twelve-gauge birdshot shell in one end of the pipe, clamped it in a vise, and wired it straight to a car battery. I hit the switch. The spark at the wire tips was feeble, and the powder didn't so much as twitch.
Voltage's not enough, then.
I didn't panic. In the back of my mind, a drawer of forgotten memory slid open.
A barren outpost. Inside a tent thick with blowing dust, Xavier — the demolition specialist sergeant on our GCP team — was hunched over something, giggling to himself. He was building an improvised electric detonator out of powder pulled from old enemy shells, parts stripped from a junk radio, and a bit of wire. He winked at me.
"Eh, Korean. A regular battery won't wake these lazy bastards up. You need a proper wake-up call. Like a camera flash. One blast and they're wide awake. Heh heh heh."
That memory offered up the answer like a flash of light in the dark.
Frank had been watching my work with interest from the side. I turned to him.
"Frank, you know anything about electrics?"
"Sure do. Automotive wiring's my specialty."
"Good. Then hear me out. I need a way to boost a twelve-volt battery to several hundred volts in an instant. Like a camera flash, for example."
Frank's eyes lit up. He had my meaning at once.
"Aha! Store the charge in a capacitor and dump it all in one shot. Now that's a damn fine idea."
He glanced over my workbench, then started rummaging through the box of radio parts we'd pulled from the wrecked trucks.
"No problem. A few capacitors this size and some resistors — I can knock together a simple boost circuit no problem."
"You can do it?"
"Can I do it? Let's see about making the boss's idea a reality!"
Frank fetched his tool bag and set to work, humming under his breath, fussing with one thing after another.
"Ahem. I've got a soldering iron, and an inverter too. We could just tap the farm's power, but anyway — give me a few minutes."
Still humming, he headed for Cyrus's workshop.
An hour or so later, Frank reappeared looking thoroughly pleased with himself.
"Here we go. This oughta do it. Haha."
I wired Frank's circuit in between the battery, the switch, and the shotgun shell, clamped the steel pipe tight in the vise, and we both backed well away. Frank flipped open the cover on the switch box.
"Alright, boss. You do the honors."
"Alright then."
I pressed the red button.
BANG!
A thunderous boom erupted as the shotgun shell fired, driving the birdshot deep into the wooden plank across the yard. It had worked.
"Holy shit! It works!"
Frank whooped as if the victory were his own, then added, "Shame to use these as one-shots, though."
"Yeah."
He picked up the pipe and went on. "Why overthink it? Cut a steel plate, weld it onto one end of the pipe, then slice about an inch off the sealed body — that way you can slide a shell in at an angle."
"Right! That'd give you a proper chamber."
"I saw grinders and everything in the farm workshop. We make the parts, then just have Mike do the welding."
"Alright. I'll handle the pipes. Frank, I need you to make me one more of those capacitor units. Another switch box wouldn't hurt either."
"You got it!"
I went to find Cyrus again. I set three cartons of cigarettes and two bottles of Jack Daniel's on the table.
"Hell, you didn't need to do all that. Haha."
"I need some more steel pipe."
"Haha. Take all you want."
"There's some fabrication work I need done, though."
I explained how the pipes had to be cut and finished. Fortunately he could weld as well, which would take some of the load off Mike.
"How many you needin'?"
"At least fifty more. A hundred, if you can manage it."
"Mm, alright. Long as we're at it, I'll make you a hundred."
Cyrus drafted his brother Merle and both his sons, and they set to work on the shotshell loading tubes. One of the boys cut the pipe to length; the other notched the ends into an L-shape. Cyrus sheared the steel plates that would cap them, and Merle welded each plate onto the L-cut end of a pipe.
In half a day, one hundred and thirty loading tubes were finished. I had no intention of mounting them all at once. For now I had twenty welded to the rear of my trailer and ten more along each side. We fitted five to each flank of Mike's minivan as well. While that was going on, Frank neatly recessed a firing switch box under the dashboard of every vehicle.
On the other side of the yard, a different job was in full swing. Mike worked the welding torch like an artist, turning out jerrycan holders, while Frank went back and forth with a tape measure and a marker, marking the exact mounting points. Dave hauled the heavy jerrycans and parts. Inside the trailer, a sturdy cargo net went up across the ceiling, and the smaller gear migrated into the air.
Two full days passed that way — a far bigger job than we had expected. Once the trailer's cargo was sorted, we had a surprising amount of space.
"One more! Just a little further!"
Dave shouted as we shoved the eleventh and final drum into the trailer. A dull thunk, and the massive drum settled into place at last.
"Jesus… eleven of them. They all actually fit."
Frank said it with genuine awe.
One last step remained. We fed a long hose from Cyrus's farm pump in through a small firing port in the trailer's side wall, and I signaled him. Cyrus looked taken aback at how much more fuel we were putting in than he had expected, but he didn't say a word about it.
A moment later came a cough and a gurgle, and diesel began pouring through the hose. The sound of fuel filling the first drum — that low, rolling gurgle — was like blood flowing into a living heart. The distinctive smell of diesel filled the trailer.
I watched in silence, and thought, This is a hell of a lot more reassuring than stockpiling a mountain of ammunition.
The morning we left the farm was unusually clear. Wiping out the Coyotes, servicing the vehicles, filling the fuel, and building out the defenses had taken six full days. Longer than expected — but I figured what we had gained in exchange was worth far more.
We ate lunch, formed up in convoy, and rolled out toward the asphalt highway, kicking up dirt as we went. In the rearview mirror, Cyrus's family stood waving the hats in their hands.
Cantankerous old bastard. But not a bad man to have crossed paths with.
Out of habit I switched on the radio. The broadcasts that had been there before were gone; nothing but a crackle of static filled the speakers. After a few tries I locked onto a channel that, static and all, was at least listenable.
Even if they take people in all month, that's still only thirty thousand.
To the millions — perhaps tens of millions — who would come, it wasn't hope. It was a cruel bait-and-switch. Even so, I understood the bind the United States was in. At the very least, I knew this was no time to point fingers or wrestle with what was right.
The broadcast moved on to a story I had all but forgotten.
A jolt of unease hit me. Northern Salt Lake City — the very ground we had passed over only a few days before.
I listened to the radio and drew a map in my head. While we had been at Cyrus's farm, bracing for disaster and gathering our strength, another disaster had crept right up to our doorstep.
The Road Warriors. They were no longer a grim rumor carried in from far away. They were a clear and present threat, waiting on the road we had to take.
My mind was a tangle — and then Dave's and Frank's cheerful voices came over the radio.
Laughter spilled across the radio. We were heading south in that warm, easy atmosphere when I glanced at the rearview mirror without thinking. And in that instant, I felt the blood in my body run cold.
Far in the distance, beyond the highway's horizon, a massive cloud of dust was rising. And from within it, a column of vehicles — dozens of them, at least — occupied every lane of the road and came screaming toward us at a terrifying speed.
I shifted my eyes to the CCTV monitor, selected the rear camera, and zoomed in as far as it would go. As the image enlarged, their true shapes came into focus. Hideously modified pickup trucks. Rust-eaten sedans. And in the beds of several pickups trailing the rear of the column, Harley motorcycles sat loaded, their chrome flashing like teeth.