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.For only the second time in my life, since becoming an adult, I had the feeling that events were slipping out of control.The first time, back during the early insurgency in Iraq, hadn’t been as bad as this, not when cities seemed to be burning everywhere.I felt numb, cold and dead inside.It hadn’t caught up with me yet.“I take it we’ve heard nothing from FEMA?”Mac shook his head glumly.We were occupying the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s official Command Post, situated under the local library, a massive building that wouldn’t have been out of place in a city.Mac’s family had gifted it to Ingalls, probably as a tax write-off, and their reading tastes dictated a lot of the volumes on the shelves.He’d told me that he’d taken shameless advantage of it when he’d been growing up, with the net result that thrillers, fantasy and right-wing power books competed uneasily for shelving.They also had a fairly good history section.I’d been in colleges that were less well supplied.“No,” he said.For a moment, he seemed to wilt.“Ed, what are we going to do?”I said nothing, thinking hard.Normally, we would have had the FEMA Director here to tell us what to do – or at least try to tell us what to do.As the local sheriff, and a former Marine with real combat experience, I had had a tendency to take over as much as possible, partly because I didn’t trust the Director.He might have had a fancy degree in Crisis Management – whatever that meant – but a single word of complaint from Ingalls could have ruined him.Predictably, he hadn’t even tried to take the lead on the handful of exercises we had run.And we were in real trouble.I knew that from the start.The satellites were going down – either through EMP or Russian ASAT weapons – and we’d lost most of our landlines to various federal facilities.I should have been able to pick up the phone and call a dozen bases, but they were all offline.I wanted to believe that the phone network, as hardened and attack-proof as it was supposed to be, had been disabled somehow, but I couldn’t allow myself to take refuge in fantasy.The odds were very good that the bases had been hit and destroyed.Fallout, I thought suddenly, recalling all of the war plans I had seen back when Mac and I had been ‘advising’ the planners.Fallout, refugees, panic, food riots…shit.I looked up at him.He was lucky, I reflected, in a moment of jealous amusement.His family and girlfriend were all within the general area surrounding Ingalls.They hadn’t been nuked, or we would have seen the blast; hell, it might well have been the last thing we’d seen before being blown to smithereens.My family was in New York…and at the moment, they might as well be on the other side of the Moon.The predictions for even a limited nuclear war – and we’d also learned that when one missile flew, the odds were good that they would all fly – were hellish.We were going to go through hell.“Mac,” I said, quietly, “we’re on our own.”He didn’t bother to dispute it.He knew the projections as well as I did.“Yes,” he said.He leaned closer to me.I could smell the cigarette smoke on his breath.“Ed, you’re the sheriff.At the moment, you’re pretty much the boss.What do you want done?”I winced.Mac had only been passing through Ingalls when the war started, restlessly wandering around the countryside.I think he missed being a soldier more than I did, even though he was on the reserve list, and he volunteered for anything that even smacked of soldiering.It might have been my idea to have the Jail Posse, but it was Mac who was the ‘unit’s’ nominal commander and supervisor.The thought of the Jail Posse reminded me of something else, something I had been avoiding thinking about.“We implement the GOTH plan,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.The GOTH plan – the Go TO Hell plan – had been something that I had designed in my head, but never really committed to paper [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]