In the beginning, there were two fellas. Both were ex-military, both had a hankerin’ for exploding things. It seemed natural they’d go into business together with their own gun smithy once Patterson inherited a nice spread of land near Safford, Arizona.
Time passed, a few years really. The twosome build a strong following among the locals with their ability to navigate BATF regulations, transfer forms and the other various arcana of gun ownership, while providing excellent smithing and reloading services – not to mention their top notch indoor and outdoor Range.
One simply learned to ignore their tangents about the evils of the BLM and other sundry opinions of the goings on of the day.
So there they were, hanging out doing their thing, Benson operating a bore lathe one handed so he could better manipulate his Pabst Blue Ribbon when the TV reception went out. Now these gentlemen had a good survivalist background with solar panels and a wind generator (not to mention as multi-story bunker under the shop that they actually lived in), so overall they were in good shape, but the loss of the TV reception created a great consternation between the friends.
Benson, as well as his beer, headed to the roof declaiming his ability to fix the damn dish, while Patterson Became more and more alarmed as he realized the extend of the outage, in spite of the power that was available.
Meanwhile, Benson’s bother in law, a fine upstanding individual by the name of Lin Tram, was sleeping off last nights shift overseeing the VLA at Mt. Graham. He was awakened by the oddest of things, an earthquake!
Now everyone knows that this part of Arizona was about as geologically active as a ’53 Edsel could run, so the noticeable shaking kicked him out of bed ready for… something. Except it was pitch black in the underground dormitory complex.
So using his phone (which naturally had no signal) he headed upstairs to the HELIOS array (you know, the part of the observatory that might actually be active during the day) where he found utter chaos! The power was not only out, but fried. The net was down, land line phones were out…. All of which pointed toward an atmospheric event, best case a solar storm (which people should have known about) or worst an EMP).
Eventually the Cats were herded and things running relatively smoothly. The scientists were able to bring up a connection to Los Alamos where they learned the worst had happened; multiple nuclear strikes in the Continental US after what turned into a general naval melee between Vietnam, Singapore, The Philippines, Japan, China and the US. This resulted in stunned disbelief and silence.
Back down at the Gunshop, Patterson was able to get ahold of his friend ‘Spanky’ who was waxing lyrical about atomized starlets drifting toward Phoenix in a cloud of radioactive death. This gave Benson and Patterson a bit of a pause, and with the prodding of Roger Cambert (neighbour, cowhand, and guy who runs some sort of Agricultural research complex for the local university) came to the decision to see if Lin Tam, Benson’s bother in law, might have anything useful to add.
Around then Director Tram received a call from one of his security guards gave him a call; is brother in law was at the gate. With a great suffering sight Lin made his way to the complex gate to find out what said brother needed.
Here began a sordid tale of the trio discussing the wherewithall and the howtofores of the worlds end. As such, (and over the horrified objections of Benson) Tram was able to shop town some pickup trucks and attach them to working ATV’s so members of the observatory could make a run to town for supplies.
Safford was in a state of mildly organized chaos. The mayor, the charismatic and respected Robert Durbin, had managed to get people vaguely organized, with a couple of 18-wheelers creating obstacles around major thoroughfares. Director Tram was able to share the news with the townsfolk. Some survivalists headed off on their own, some people were selected to enter the Civil Defense shelter under the town hall. Other’s made for the reasonably safe safe Ag complex (and to help with a giant jerking party in order to harvest as much livestock as possible). A few others were allowed into both the Observatory and the shelter under BP gun-shop. And there they waited, knowing full well the doomed fate of those whom required medications and ans a result volunteered to not enter the shelters (other than a few notable incidents of aggressive persuasion).
There the population waited to see what would happen.
And waited…..
“Pretty f’ing bad! Major cities are toast. Nuclear shit haze everywhere. And no more tap beer.”
First it was days. Then weeks. All in all the Survivors of Safford, Arizona spent over 4 months in those damned holes in the ground. Some adapted. Some went insane. Some just got plane lucky. There were deaths, most notably Mayor Bob died tying to diffuse a knife fight over a girl. His death sparked a riot in the Civil Defense shelter killing over 50 people. At P&B 5 of 15 died in a fight over the last special sauce rigatoni MRE. It turns out people don’t do well in underground cages.
But eventually, after an eternity, the outdoor Geiger Counters died down and the populace started to emerge. Turns out about half the town survived, although there was an incident in the city hall shelter which resulted in the loss of the mayor and most of the people who hunkered down there.
The next weeks involved exploring the country-side and seeing what survived.
Ostriches up the Gila toward turtle mountain will probably be a godsend as not much along the lines of cattle or sheep made it though.
People took up scraping the topsoil by hand and replanting under the direction of Miss Hamilton.
Soon enough a group got curious about the outside world and took some horses down around Wilson. What they found was rather disturbing (even more so than what happened at the Prison. I’ll not relate that story for the sake of tender ears).
There they found some people who had survived the past six months, but were under siege by…. Well, not people any more. Soon enough they were called zombies though that didn’t make sense either. Anyway. Some shooting, a blown up over pass, and the group along with the Curtis clan and friends headed back to Cactus Flats to regroup.
So next the fellas decided to scout up along the Gila toward the San Carlos and Globe. This ones nice an short really; Peridot and San Carlos were wastelands except for a couple of survivalist shelters here and there, and the San Carlos damn collapsed – putting paid to Winkleman, Kearny and God knows what else toward Casa Grande. On the good side there were a few people who were busily scraping the ground on the San Carlos, so that might turn out good.
But here we get to Globe. Globe is famous for its mines. And I think that’ll be the same in the future. But recently the place has had a hard time of it as copper isn’t as valuable as it once was. And as such a group of secretive oddballs bought mine #6 up toward Sycamore Spring. Well by and by our heroes made it to Globe only to find it deserted – probably because the smoke plumes from the fires in Phoenix were still visible, even 6 months after the disaster.
They explored the town, marking a few spots for salvage teams. Eventually they made it to the mining complex where they found… hundreds? Thousands of the zombie things milling under the desert sun slowly broiling in their juices. All of ’em seemed to be puzzling out how to work a giant steel door set in the mountainside.
Short of the long, our boys attracted the attention of all of the zombies and blew up an oil tank pretty much vaporizing all of the critters. They then dynamited the pass for highway 60 just to be sure that no more of the corpses would walk up from the valley.
And the Steel doors of Globe? Still closed. No idea what goes on in there, even to this day.
Next up our boys decided it was time to look for Mr. Trams wife out in Tucson. So a quick highlight tour.
Our group followed the Gila river, deciding it would be the best route to get to Tuscon while avoiding more of the dead down around Wilcox. So they built a raft to float down the Gila though the Pinal mountains. Their fist bit of real excitement was an attempted robbery out in Copper Canyon near Christmas. This turned out to be Christmas for the gents as it turned out their robbers were a bunch of women from some sort of day trip that went all to hell. Half of the group had been washed away when the damn blew. The others survived in he abandoned mine structures around Christmas. Luckily they had enough supplies to survive (also thanks to a bit of careful looting of Hayden and Winkleman), while also discovering that bronze armor works great against zombie teeth. That’s how they got labeled Amazons.
The group extended an invitation for the ladies to relocate to Safford which was gratefully accepted. In return they told the fellas about monsters around Hayden. Giant worms they said. The group followed their advice and stuck to the higher ridges around Hayden. It was for this reason they witnessed some sort of giant worm emerge from the flood sludge around the town and eat a cow. Much skedaddling went on from there.
Next the group made their way south along the Mammoth road. Their goal was to skip Oracle and Catalina and to make for Tuscon by taking the San Pedro road. Sadly by taking this route the heroes failed to lean about events in Summerhaven or Biosphere, but that is for another tale.
What they did find was an odd place on the Eastern foothills; lovely white building with bronzed windows, low walls, red tile roofs all build in a crescent facing a large golden / bronze obelisk. A sign on the road proclaimed it the community of Sanctuary, welcoming all visitors. The fella’s felt this was far to suspicious and left in a hurry.
Eventually they made it over the pass. The left Patterson with the horses as the rest of the group made their way to Trams abandoned house in the La Cebadilla Estates. A beautiful place, sadly abandoned. That night they were witness to something disturbing. Under the midnight stars they saw the shadowy skyline of downtown Tuscon illuminated by a single building – the tallest in the city – light up like there was not a problem in the world, with beams of light extending into the heavens and the cardinal points. Oh. And not to mention the thousands of zombies milling around every place they could see.
?????
From Mr. Tram’s place on the east side the group made their way to the water outflow pipes in Tanque Verde Wash. They made their way though Tucson to the fortified mission of San Xavier del Bac where they had been told there was a group of survivors holding out. There was a brief diversion in their underground trek which involved blowing up a gas station to distract a goodly sized hoard, but that was but a diversion.
The group met up with Father Jose Hernandez and others where they learned the disposition of Tucson – basically population turned into minions of whatever is living in the Tower. Welcome to a badly written fantasy novel with a low effects budget.
A couple of days later the group made their way to the University Campus to get the documents they were looking for once again via flood-ways and steam tunnels. They managed to find a construction yard near the CBS building which had the research about all of this nonsense they were interested in, which they prepped for exit. From there it was simple simple to sneak via rooftop zip lines onto the roof of their building of interest and down into the labs where they found the information they needed: in short the zombies were powered and controlled via a nanotechnology that was susceptible to high electrical current.
Everything looked good. They had everything they needed. Time to exit. Except for a small compilation; a group of students trapped on the 18th floor of Gould-Simpson across the street. Thus began the daring rescue plan with Sven climbing side of the building and everyone rappelling down to safety. It would have worked too if it wasn’t for that darned kid kicking the window on the way down waking up every zombie in the building.
Needless to say – insert a chase scene involving gunfire, and ever increasing hoard of zombies, explosions, cement trucks, underground tunnels and Jessie Tram silhouetted in the moonlight watching all of it in disappointment.
The group made it back to the Mission which was promptly abandoned – as they all fled south to the Mission San Jose in Tubac. From there the refugees continued over land to Huachuca City (which emanated an indescribable feeling of horror and dread) to Tombstone (which had an unhallowed, off ambiance – but nothing compared to Sierra Vista) and from there back to Wilcox via Elfrida.
The end result of all of this was Tram began a program of storing electo-static electricity and creating what would become ‘Tesla Arms of Safford’.
The hoard of Tucson, and the unknown horrors of Sierra Vista were left for another day.