Hard Favored Rage: A Cop's EMP Apocalypse Story

Ventura County Sheriff EMP Series Book 1

What would life look like after an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) robs Southern California of electricity, communications, and utilities while cars are starved of fuel? Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles, planned for a nuclear attack, but not a devastating EMP.

In the jail, deputy Mika Fischer is left in the dark as the lights suddenly go out and the cell doors won’t lock. As inmates are released, the sheriff’s office must face the realities of the collapse of the modern world. 

After retreating to a well-prepared ranch with family and friends, deputies David Palmer and Sam Church realize that they cannot abandon the public. Soon they find that they have to make hard decisions that challenge the “latte and yoga pants” morality of the former world in a situation where ruthlessness is often the difference between life and death. 

As violence and desperation increases and a mysterious enemy has cast its hungry eyes on the county, the deputies must leave behind their old ways and find a balance between being a warrior and a keeper of the peace. In the apocalyptic chaos, can the men and women of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office keep the threads of society together while everything falls apart, or do they descend into the same brutality as the villains?

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Excerpt: With a Whimper

The most cataclysmic moment in American history was entirely anti-climactic. The car stalled and the computer died. That was it. There was no flash, no explosion, just an unusual “click” on the Motorola police radio. For a second, Deputy David Palmer sat in silence, then smacked the steering wheel with his palm. In a few minutes he would realize that this was not an automotive problem, but the end of the world as he knew it.
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The only sign to mark the momentous change the beautiful Southern California day had just undergone was a stalled engine. Countless disabled vehicle calls taught him one thing; if the car stops running, try turning the key again. Many times, the “dead” car fired right up when Palmer tried it, shocking the clueless motorist who didn’t think of that. Except in his case, the car didn’t turn over. 

With a groan, he hit the hood release, got out of the car, and switched on the portable radio on his belt. It was second nature anytime he got out of a vehicle. The radio beeped twice, telling him it was active. From the trunk, he dug a screwdriver out of his tool bag and keyed his shoulder mic.
“Station 1, 3-Adam-11,” he called. No answer from dispatch. “Station 1, 3-Adam-11.” Silence.

He called his partner, Sean Sibley, who responded on the second try.

“My unit died and Dispatch can’t hear me.”

“Your car just went 10-7 too?”

“Affirmative.”

“Mine too. I’m on my portable.”

Palmer grabbed his cell phone. It was on but displayed “No service.”

“Hey, uh, I think something bad happened. I’m gonna try something to start my car. Standby.”

“Copy.”

Palmer opened the hood and disconnected the battery terminals. He waited a minute and reattached them before turning the key. The Tahoe cranked over as normal. The electrical system had latched up. Weird.

“3-Adam-11 to Ojai units,” Palmer called. “Anyone else have their unit go down?”

1-Adam-11, a car assigned to the city of Ojai, responded. “Affirm, me too.”

City car call signs started with 1 and the letter pronounced phonetically as Adam or Boy and the unincorporated area cars, three in number, began with 3A. Like many cities in Southern California, Ojai contracted with the sheriff for police services, having shuttered its own miniscule independent force decades ago.

“Hey David, what did you do to start your car?” someone else radioed.

“Disconnected the battery terminals, waited a second, and started it.”

“Copy.”

“Ojai units,” a detective radioed, “you see all the smoke?”

“Negative,” David replied. “I was Code 7.” So much for eating lunch today. “What’s up?”

“Lots of smoke in the air. Nothing big, but I can see several puffs of it all over town. Kind of electrical/ozone smell, too.”

“It’s transformers exploding,” a deputy who had once been an apprentice lineman said, without identifying himself. “The sounds like gunshots were the fused cutouts blowing.”

David steered his car towards the Dennison Grade, which would give him an aerial view into the city of Ojai. Several units were trying to raise the substation by radio alternating with calling Dispatch in Ventura, the county seat.

Palmer liked living in Ventura County. An hour west of Los Angeles it was a comfortable, middle class place to live with lots of open green spaces. Much of that had changed since the Palmer family arrived to farm a century ago. Now the sugar beet fields were all gone, strawberries, citrus, and avocados were the cash crops. It was still rural enough that that the nearly one million people in three separate urban areas seemed to blend in with the landscape. Any patrol deputy knew that despite the suburbs and occasional out-of-control celebrity they were just one call away from herding loose cows from the road.

“Anyone got a working phone? And is your computer dead too?”

“Affirmative on the MDC,” or mobile data computer, “negative on the phone. FM radio is blank too.” The chatter was so fast, no one identified themselves properly.

“Switch to AM radio and listen to the static. Never heard anything like that before.”

“I can’t even hear the other West County units.”

David found it amazing how quickly radio discipline evaporated in the absence of Dispatch. Something was definitely off. As chatty as the Ojai units were, someone from one of the other three stations on the same channel should be heard.

“Repeaters could be down.”

“1-Adam-11, 3-Adam-13,” one of the county cars called. Senior Deputy Kohler had radio discipline, “back before your time, we didn’t have repeaters. You could still occasionally pickup clear traffic from twenty miles away. We should be hearing weak signals.”

“Could be EMP,” David offered.

“True.” Kohler paused for a second before keying the mic again. “To those of you who don’t know, EMP is an electromagnetic pulse, from a high-altitude nuke or solar flare. It shorts out all electric circuits. Definitely would fry the grid and it would explain why the computers, cell networks, and repeaters are down.”

“That would explain this transformer I’m watching burn,” 5-Boy-6, a detective, radioed.
“Did you call county fire?”

“Affirm, Engine 23 advises they’re driving to visual reports of smoke. Same radio problems as us.” David could see wisps of smoke rising from over a dozen different places.

“Guys, so if this is EMP, why do our cars and radios work? Couldn’t this be a power outage or cyber-attack?”

David spoke up again. “Who knows what happened. Somebody want to 10-19 to the station and check in with Sarge?”

Senior Kohler, the ranking supervisor, spoke up. “Ojai units, here’s the plan. Everybody patrol your area, start asking people what’s up. Let’s see if we can find working phones, TV, radio, etc. See if someone with solar panels has Internet or not. I’m going by the station. Palmer, drive down to Santa Paula PD and see what they know, then head back. In the meantime, patrol neighborhoods and give any help you can.”

Everyone took turns radioing in “Copy.”

David knew that his wife, Brooke, would be at home sleeping. Gonna have to go by and wake her up since her alarm won’t go off. As a brand-new obstetrical nurse she was stuck working night shifts for the foreseeable future and would be dead to the world for several more hours. His sister Carlie, also a nurse, was probably safe at work and her husband could check up on her.

Working for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office had been a lifelong dream of Palmer’s. He always wanted to be a cop, but in high school when he learned the distinction between the local city cops, the deputies, and the Highway Patrol, he had to go with the agency that truly did it all. Unlike many sheriff’s departments across the country, in California they did
everything from policing the unincorporated areas to contract cities, search and rescue, the usual civil process serving and bailiff duties, to even traffic enforcement. And there were five contract cities and seven distinct county areas to work.

It wasn’t as exciting as the office’s bigger brother to the south, the Los Angeles County Sheriff, but Ventura County still had part of Malibu and some fine-looking helicopters. A lot of it was institutional pride, but Palmer thought he had the best job in the world. The county was just big enough to keep busy, but still small and rural enough to be fun. It was also nice working for an agency that was well-respected professionally and by the public as well.

On his way down the hill into Santa Paula, a landscaper from Thomas Aquinas College, a small university tucked in the hills, stopped David to ask what was going on. All David could do was shrug; nothing reassuring from a man who people expected to have all the answers. His own self-doubt and urge to deny his worst fears created an emotional and rational log-jam that he hid well.
If an EMP blast did occur, things would quickly become dire. Dire enough to require making drastic choices. Palmer was a prepper and took the time to learn about these things and prepare accordingly. But did an EMP actually happen? Fiction and documentaries always portrayed EMP as able to kill cars, watches, radios, and fry cell phones. It was odd that, as far as he could tell, the pulse didn’t disable the VHF radios and even left the cell phones on, even if they had no service. The power was out and auxiliary generators didn’t seem to work. The facts didn’t fit what he expected, but nothing else would explain his observations. Cyber-attacks didn’t make cars randomly stop running or fill AM airwaves with static that popped and rolled in waves.

Shock and denial aside, he knew beyond a reasonable doubt that an EMP event had occurred. Nothing else could explain the mass failure of the power system, complete with transformer fires, short-outs, and voltage surges, plus the loss of broadcast commercial radio, FM/VHF radio attenuation, and vehicles stalling.

He burst out laughing; his best friends Sean Sibley and Sam Church, were right. An EMP finally happened. Church and the Sibleys were also preppers, complete with years’ worth of food, ammo, and even gas masks. Palmer and his family concentrated on different calamities, like earthquakes, that were lower risk, but of higher probability. Living in earthquake country, it seemed prudent.
Palmer was seasoned enough that panic or fear did not immediately set in. He figured he should have a deep sense of foreboding, but instead he was laughing. The lack of some tangible effect bordering on the supernatural left him in a state of semi-disbelief. His observations confirmed what his intellect told him, but the EMP was far less powerful than his expectations. The reality of the event not living up to his “back to the 1800s” hype combined with the sunny, warm summer day to produce a feeling that it was nothing more than a fluke.

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