Cascadia Fallen- Tahoma's Hammer by Austin Chambers

Author:Austin Chambers [Chambers, Austin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781733959308
Publisher: Austin Chambers
Published: 2019-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

The Slaughter County Sheriff’s Department, like many policing agencies across the state, had upgraded all deputies to mandatory twelve-hour shifts. Sergeant Charlie Reeves was working a midnight to noon rotation. In normal times things would wind down before dawn. But on the third day after the event, Charlie noticed a shift in paradigm that coincided with Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs. Everyone is down in the bottom tiers. He couldn’t remember the names of the needs, but he knew things like food, water, shelter, and safety more or less covered the bottom of the triangle. Except for the heroin and meth addicts—they seem the same. Charlie was no fool, though. He knew they would eventually run out of drugs and become the biggest threats.

Theft reports were lower than normal, a fact he attributed to the piss poor communications. He knew the addicts were stealing anything they could get their hands on. He figured the “honest” were starting to steal, too, once they realized the grocery stores weren’t reopening. What most stores were doing, however, was hiring armed security. They were trading small amounts of goods to have a handful of people visible at all hours. I can see it already, Charlie thought. There will eventually be a mass run on these stores as people get thirsty and hungry. Someone will eventually get shot. A lot of someones, he corrected himself. His and other departments weren’t even going to investigate small scale thefts anymore. They just didn’t have the people, time, or gas.

Each morning the makeshift shelter at the mall parking lot had grown about twice the size as the morning before. He’d heard it was the same throughout the county. Some people were finding other places to crash at night, but before dusk he witnessed a migration. They’re getting hungry…and impatient. He knew these morning feedings were only going to grow, both in size and intensity. I wonder when FEMA will push us to start shepherding folks to their “cattle-pen” in Bartlett?

One of Charlie’s patrol deputies had radioed for some back up at the mall. A small fight had broken out in the north parking lot. Charlie had just pulled in from the north end of Sylvan Way, forced to take a longer route due to a large sinkhole due east of the mall property. He had been up in the Hilltop neighborhood to the northeast, so it took him about four minutes to show up. He knew from chatter that another deputy was about two minutes further out.

“Fuck you, pig!” he heard as soon as he stepped out of his rig. His deputy, a fellow grave-yarder named Jesus “Zeus” Ocampo, was trying to keep two pairs of people from getting at each other. The small melee was surrounded by about three hundred people waiting for a Red Cross foodline to open. He ran over and pushed his way into the middle.

“Stop!” he commanded, pushing his big frame into the foray to join Zeus. His deputy was bleeding from his forearm and had his taser drawn.

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