The Stars and Stripes appeared on screen, with the music of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The flag was replaced with scenes of U.S. Air Force jets flying in a diamond formation; that was replaced with a Navy destroyer at sea; and that was replaced with Army tanks rushing across a desert.
Then, suddenly the music stopped and the screen went black. After a moment, a placard was placed on the screen.
By order of Mehdi Ohmshidi,
Supreme Leader, New World Collective,
Broadcasting on this network has been
suspended for engaging in acts of sedition
Although it had been some time since the president ordered a seventy-five percent reduction in force, no RIF orders had come down. That was understandable as there was almost a complete breakdown at all levels of the military, and the Pentagon was no longer issuing orders. Fort Rucker was a mere shadow of itself, practically a ghost town now, with only a few hundred soldiers still present for duty.
At this point, “Present for duty” was nothing more than an entry in the morning report, or it would have been if company clerks were still filing morning reports. But morning reports were no longer being filed because there were very few company clerks remaining and many of the clerks who did remain had no first sergeants or company commanders to validate the reports. Four fifths of the buildings on the base stood vacant, the classrooms and training facilities were empty, entire companies of the TO&E units were gone, and the base headquarters was just a shell with no more than two or three officers and NCOs still reporting for duty.
Those soldiers who were still reporting to their duty station did so as a matter of habit, and because they had nowhere else to go, or nothing else to do. They tried to hang on to a semblance of the lives they had before all this happened by coming to “work” though all they did was play hearts, bridge, poker, and blackjack. They gambled hundreds of dollars on every card, losing or winning with aplomb because, increasingly, money was losing its meaning. Most of the lower-ranking soldiers who did remain on the base did so only because the Army was still supplying them with quarters and food.
But even that was not a guarantee. The mess halls had not had a new delivery in the last two weeks, and the post was running critically low on provisions. Also there were few cooks remaining so, more often than not, the preparation of the food was being done by the soldiers themselves.
The stimulus package of one hundred thousand dollars issued by Ohmshidi, who now called himself Supreme Leader, to individuals to “jump-start” the economy, had long ago been used up. Those who cashed their checks immediately realized some benefit. Those who deposited their checks in the bank had money on paper, but not in reality, as a cascading closure of banks all across the country left much of the deposited money in limbo and unaccounted for.
By now, it made little difference what the money was worth anyway, as there was a steadily decreasing availability of goods and services. Automobile factories had shut down long ago, including foreign car companies, but the auto industry wasn’t the only production stopped. No longer was there any major manufacturing of any kind, from aircraft, to household appliances, guns, and furniture, to clothing. In addition, food-processing plants had stopped so that no canned, frozen, or packaged food was being produced, and the food remaining in the nation’s inventory was being used up at an alarming rate.
The value of stocks plummeted so far that there were no viable stocks remaining, and the market stopped all trading. Gasoline was rationed to five gallons per family, per week. The posted cost of gasoline, mandated by the government, was two hundred dollars per gallon, but the rationing and the cost were meaningless, as there were fewer and fewer service stations that actually had gasoline. Those few stations that did have gasoline would no longer sell for any amount of money, but would exchange it for something tangible. Bartering had become the new medium of exchange, and farmers and gardeners who had eggs, chickens, pigs, and vegetables became the new wealthy.
Unlike the Great Depression of the 1930s, when people who had cash were able to weather the storm, money meant nothing in this economy. Millionaires, and those billionaires who had managed to hide their money from Ohmshidi’s “equalization” confiscation, discovered that it was all for naught. Those with assets in cash, stocks, and bonds, were totally wiped out.
Eventually all transportation came to a halt—the airlines halted operations, trains quit running, trucks stopped rolling. The interstate highway system had no traffic, though that wasn’t to say that it had no cars. It had become the final resting place for millions of cars. There was a forced egalitarianism among automobiles, whether new and luxurious, or old and austere; they contributed equally to the national graveyard of vehicles, sitting alongside each other, abandoned right where they had run out of gas.
The trailers of the abandoned trucks had all been forced open and emptied of whatever cargo they might have been carrying. The state police no longer patrolled the roads and highways and, on those interstates not blocked off by parked cars, drivers who had gasoline, and who were foolish enough to waste it, could drive over one hundred miles per hour without worrying about a traffic ticket.
At Fort Rucker, as at nearly every other military base, the post exchange, commissary, and clubs were all closed. Aircraft sat unattended on the flight lines of all five Fort Rucker airfields. There was no traffic of military vehicles, and even the MPs, the few who remained, stayed in their quarters, or reported to the office only out of a sense of habit. Like the city and state police all across the nation, law enforcement was nonexistent.
The Daleville and Ozark gates were unattended, which meant the post could be entered by anyone, military or civilian, and there were increasing numbers of civilians wandering around the base to see what they could take, scavenging without opposition from any of the soldiers, most of whom were now scavenging for their own survival.
Nearly all of the local power-generating companies in and around Fort Rucker had gone off-line from their own resources, but had, so far, managed to maintain service by drawing electrical power from other grids around the nation. However, the condition was so precariously balanced that any unprogrammed surge could have catastrophic results. Fort Rucker was not affected because it was generating its own power, sufficient for the fort’s use, though not enough to help the neighboring towns.
At the North American Electric Reliability Council, in an attempt to balance the electrical usage with decreasing fuel allocations, a switch was thrown, temporarily diverting so much power into the Ohio-based First Energy power lines that the system became overloaded. At the same time the warning system was short-circuited so that the monitors were unaware that a problem was developing.
1900 Zulu: A 689-megawatt coal plant in Eastlake, Ohio, went out of service.
2006 Zulu: A 345-kilovolt power line tripped off, putting strain on a neighboring line.
2032 Zulu: The power overload on the neighboring line caused it to sag and go out of service.
2115 Zulu: Two more 345-kilovolt lines failed within five minutes of each other.
2130 Zulu: Two 345-kilovolt lines in Michigan tripped off. A coal-fired plant near Grand Haven, Michigan went off-line.
