Getting shot fucking sucks. I’ve got a bruise the size and color of Idaho on my side, and it feels like a rib is cracked. If I hadn’t had the vest, I’d have been dead. Oleg said he’s going to the Navy Base to see who those guys were, but I can’t come. Screw that, there’s a great story here, and I’m going. I just have to convince them of this.

Theories are abundant about the events of yesterday, and so are the issues. The guys were definitely violent, and according to Oleg and the rest of the crew, new to the area. This leads to the first question. There were a number of people living in that neighborhood. Were they still there, killed, or did they move on after being pushed out? Any of these are possible. If they stayed, they probably had to pay some form of protection, probably had to give up quite a bit of what they had built up in terms of food and energy resources. That’s not a good thing for anyone to do. If they had left, Oleg thinks they would have passed by to warn the project. They were friendly with the community, and had reached out to them time and again. Leaving without a warning seemed out of character for that relationship. That left them dead, an option Oleg didn’t want to consider. There were five families in that neighborhood. Nobody would come in and just kill that many people, how could they?

Next issue was how far did the territory of this new group reach? The roads we would take to the Naval yards skirted that neighborhood, what if they sat on that road waiting to ambush travelers? Should we go further south around, or would that waste too much gas?

They would also have to work towards fortifying more now than on other projects which could extend the life support efforts. Less focus on the power network, less focus on the computers. More need for metal. Metal is heavy, hard to bring back to the facility. Needs more power, which means more focus on the biodiesel production. More scavenging, more exposure.

So they began planning the trip. And this is where I insisted I come.

“No.” Their reply. “You can barely hold yourself upright.”

I was laying down, I had to admit. I tried to sit up, and it was a slow and laborious process, but I got there, dammit.

“I’m going.”

“No. You aren’t well enough, and its up to us to risk ourselves. You’re our guest.”

“I’m a reporter, and I need to get the full story. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“You could have cracked ribs.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“She’ll be hard to move in an attack. We can’t do it.”

“I’m the only one here with survival training. You guys are just reading it from a book you found in the library.”

“We can’t.”

I’m summarizing a bit. There was more to the discussions, but when I got that out of them, well, their reply didn’t start with a no, so I must have been wearing them down.

“I’ve broken ribs and been training again in three days. They taught me how to deal with the pain. This is nothing.”

They looked around the room at each other.

“We’re going to have to build up our defenses, both here and on the vehicles before we go.”

“Two days. We’ll see how you are, Lori.”

So I’m going. No way I’m not. Time to help them prepare.

10/05/2012

There were gunshots in the streets last night. We had planned a scavenger run, but now it’s going to be incident investigation as well. Oleg is especially concerned. He has friends in the neighborhoods we heard the shots in. He offered to let me stay home, but I wasn’t afraid to take the trip. We suited up, bulletproof vests, shotguns and handguns. Guns were never exactly scarce in the States, but bullets were a precious resource. There may have been millions in stockpiles in various places, but those places were raided early on, and they aren’t making any more. It looked like Oleg’s gear was mostly police issued. I wondered how he got his hands on that, but it wasn’t time to ask. It was time to go out.

The vehicle we took was a diesel Mercedes Monica had modified to run biodiesel. The doors had been removed, as had the windshield and the roof. She’d plated the tires with some extra metal on the outside, and one bullet hole testified as to why. When I got here, Oleg said there were rough areas around here.

We headed south along a main road and then turned east into a residential area. It looked like a nice neighborhood once. Now, most of the homes showed significant damage and decay. Many windows were broken, some collapsed porches, and some were kept up. Our first stop was at one of these.

Monica stopped the car in the middle of the road, and we got out, keeping a close eye on all directions. Oleg alone went to the door. He knocked and waited. Then he called in, and nothing came back.

“Back in the car.”

We piled in, and Monica started moving again.

“Well, maybe they’re out.”

We wound our way further into the enclave, looks like the area was all one large development with about a dozen styles of homes. The winding streets felt like they must have been peaceful once.

“This area,” Oleg told me, “Used to support the college, the naval bases and industry further east, very professional.”

We came to another clean house. Again, the SWAT routine. Again, he knocked, and no one was home. Then a shot hit me. I flew forward a little bit, tripped on my feet and landed face forward in the street. Bastards shot me in the back. Where the fuck were they? Oleg picked me up fast and we rushed back to the car, but by the time we were seated, there were gunmen in front of and behind us. A leader stepped forward.

“We control this neighborhood now.”

“Who are you?” Oleg said. We all had guns drawn. Not a winnable situation.

“You’ll see. Now get the fuck out.”

The leader nodded and they opened up behind us.

We got to a safer spot, at least there was no place to hide, and they stopped and turned to me.

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah, a little freaked, but yeah.”

“Turn around, let’s see your back.”

I did. The bullet didn’t get through. It was a pretty small caliber. They had bigger weapons, it was a warning shot, but I thought those were usually fired into the air.

For now, they’re making me rest. I’ll be able to relate the discussions Oleg had with the rest of them later.

Tidewater Community College – Oleg woke me early today to get a look at some of the power generation efforts of the compound. We started with the sun, with the solar arrays. On the upper floors of the south end of the building, they had lined up just about any kind of solar panel they could find. When I asked where they had come from, they had a long list of places. The largest source had been traffic and construction lots, where solar panels powered road signs and came with large batteries. They had wheeled over two hundred of these here from a few different yards, and were still bringing some in as they found them. They dedicated almost half of their scavenging runs to getting these solar panels and batteries. The panels and batteries became an array, and it had supplied enough power for the compound before the computers came on line. In a unique use of recycling, they reused the lights in the compound and the chassis were modified in the shop into a pair of spikes which were positioned around the border fence to discourage trespass or vehicular breaches of the fence.

This wasn’t the only source of solar panels. They took some from houses, some from public sites, I think they even had a number of solar panels from calculators wired up. When I saw some of these small ones Oleg simply smiled.
“Every little bit helps.”

We then went into the bowels of the buildings. There I met Pawel Raczick, an Eastern European engineer who was in the States on a temporary visa when things happened and he was stuck. He was working on a diesel generator which had been on the property, had converted it to biodiesel production. The generator was not running during the day with the amount of power the solar panels were providing. They tried to run it only overnight, to keep their computer links active. I was actually talking to a significant percentage of the people in the world who had an email address right here.

Pawel took us up to a greenhouse of sorts he had created in the central atrium of one of the buildings. Here, he had constructed many frames which held curtains of sheet plastic tubes filled with water, an algae farm. From these, and several other sites he had on the location, he harvested algae and made biodiesel fuel from them.
Pawel was a small man, humble, with graying straggly hair and a bent pair of glasses. Everywhere he went, the smell of a workshop followed, the smell of lubricants and oil.

We met then for lunch, the biggest meal of the day for all of them, and over lunch they talked about progress and problems, a free exchange of knowledge all in the drive for a better and stronger community. They also spoke about capacity, something on everybody’s mind, and if they could bring in anybody else from the surrounding area and sustain their needs with food and power production. They talked about digging up one of the parking lots to make a field for planting, but they weren’t sure if there was enough fuel for the machines to do it, and how fertile the ground would be afterwards. Intelligent sustainability was the most common thread of the meal, and I began to understand, every meal.

As I approached the compound, I found a chain link fence surrounding what once had been a parking lot, and which now was a field of concrete obstructions and defensive berms surrounded by a barbed wire fence. There was one obvious gate with extra reinforcements and since I was both friendly and expected, I approached without hesitation. A video screen in the wall next to me in the entrance started up, but then died. It tried to work a couple more times, but never did. Then a hand-held spotlight began to make its way out towards me, spilliting time between blinding me and shining on the ground. For the last twenty feet or so, it never left me, except when the guy carrying it almost tripped.

“Who are you?” he said. He was a little guy, a little older, with a long fine beard and a shock of curly hair lining the sides of his head. He wore a rubber apron and walked with a slight limp.

“I’m from the Times. Soren sent me. I’m supposed to talk to Oleg.”

He sniffed a little bit, seemed a little indignant about me. Then he took out a handheld walkie talkie. He tried to call to home base for a minute, but it wasn’t working either. He squeezed the hand pump for about a minute, then tried again. Nothing.

“Hang on.”

Then he turned and walked back just like he came out. After ten minutes, he came back with a fairly large guy with thick glasses and a big smile across his face.

“Ms. Kim! I’m delighted to have you here.”

They opened the gate and allowed me into the compound. I drove my bike behind him into the main compound at a slow walk’s pace. He led me along a path that seemed arbitrary until we got closer to the compaound and he mentioned the defense mechanisms they had in place prevented a more direct route.

He opened a garage door on the lower levels of the main building and asked me to park, and from there  we went up to the top floors into what had been classrooms and now were workshops.

“We’ve been trying to reach you.”

I pulled out my phone.

“It’s dead. Waterlogged.”

He frowned a little, took it and had it opened in seconds.

“We’re glad you made it. There’s some rough parts around here.”

I didn’t have any trouble. They must not be rough enough to brave the storm. I don’t know why I felt the need to act tough, but I did.

He wheeled his way across the room to a shelf and grabbed a part from one of the many bins and then wheeled back to his soldering gun. Then again. He repeated a few times, and at least once, cracked open an old cell phone.

“Still, you got here.”

“So what do you do here?”

“We’re rebuilding. I’ll give you the nickel tour tomorrow.”

Then he put the halves of my phone together and tossed it back to me.

“Should work now. I’ll show you to your room.”

I tried to push him to show me more, but he wasn’t having any of it.

I’m in a large building in Virginia Beach. Used to be a community college, but now no one occupies it. There’s the remnants of an Atlantic Hurricane trailing off to the north of us. My phone became waterlogged and inoperable about a week ago in the rain, and I’ve been unable to communicate.

With no national weather service, no disaster relief agencies, there’s no way to predict what the weather will do. I just rolls in over you, levels towns and moves back out to sea. I don’t know if there’s anybody to name storms anymore, so I named this one Professor Lanegan. He was my martial arts instructor, and this storm hit almost as hard as he did.

First time I saw Hurricane Lanegan, it was a gray mist on the horizon. Obviously a storm, but who knew how bad it would be? I tried to gauge my estimated time to my destination, and thought I could make it. I didn’t know it was just the leading front of something much larger. The sky turned darker and darker, and the wind kicked up tremendously. It was practically impossible to make forward progress, and I was in the middle of nowhere. I was 30 miles from any semblance of a town, and then I couldn’t tell how far because I had to dodge the signs as they ripped from the ground.

I found shelter in the grammar school in a small town. Grammar schools are almost always brick buildings with cinder block insides, and so they are safe as you can get. They were designed as community shelters for storms and nuclear attacks, and that kind of thinking definitely saved my life. Drove the bike right up the steps and into the main entry. There were two families in the building. They saw me pulling up, and opened the door, just as a large tree blew down over the steps.

Times like this, you don’t really think about some of the standard survival instincts. The strangers are never aggressive towards the outsider, you don’t worry about resources. You’re all just happy to be alive.

I moved the bike into a hallway, shut it down and took stock of my situation. I was soaked through, and likely so was everything in the bike. I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket, and it dripped. I opened it up, pulled out the battery and shook it out. Not much else I could do.

The two families stared at me in wonder. One was a mother, maybe 35, two kids, a boy and girl probably seven and nine, and a grandfather, I guessed. The other was a young couple, could have still been teenagers, and an infant.

“Thanks for opening the doors,” I said.  They looked almost as afraid of me as they were of the storm, at least until

I shared some of the canned goods I had, and we weathered the storm for two days. The roof of the gymnasium caved in, or partly tore off. Could have been a tornado. Some debris broke windows in several of the classrooms. We kept to the inner halls and the offices, the most protected areas.  Seemed like there was hardly any time for conversation as something was happening around us almost always. Windows breaking, trees being uprooted.

And then the storm lifted.

The outside was brown, all the trees had been stripped of their leaves, the streets and lawns were mud. My phone still didn’t work, and hasn’t since.

After the ordeal, We simply parted ways, having shared another disaster.

From that point, I chased the coattails of the storm, and I mean chased. I wanted to get to safety fast, especially with no phone to provide backup. In a disaster like this, with no communication, you could just disappear and I wasn’t going to let a little rain slow me down on that. Finally pulled into Tidewater Community College at dusk and in the rain. Headed straight for the only light in the place. Got my bike into the building, and finally got some rest.