SODIUM:2 Apocalypse by Stephen Arseneault

were unable to reach home before sunset and were not brave enough to use headlights, so we pulled off the side of the road under some trees. We had managed a sufficient distance from the green cloud that I was no longer worried about its danger. We had some camo covers that we pulled over the trucks as extra disguise and we then settled in for the night in our cabs. It had been a strange but interesting day.

Chapter 12

    The next morning we were back at our normal routines. We had raided several collapsed libraries in the previous months and Rachel had been like a machine at reading and learning everything she could about farming. After only a little more than a year, her knowledge probably rivaled someone that had been doing it all their lives. And she was always eager to learn more.
    Janie had done some reading on animal care that had helped her also, but she didn’t have the patience of her sister to read for hours on end. Mastering animal husbandry and farming were two skill sets that would be increasingly valuable for any long term survival of the colony.
    David didn’t show the same commitment as the girls when it came to the tasks assigned to him. They were more mundane construction or maintenance type of tasks and he never developed an interest in them. He was instead still consumed by the coil gun and increasingly with Rachel. To date we had all gotten along quite well, but I knew I was at some point going to have to talk with David about pulling his own weight.
    I had decided to build a large covered structure under the trees near the Kendall’s former home. Basically I wanted to raise what looked like the ground, ten feet into the air. From the air it would still looked like the ground, but from below we could move around under the canopy freely. We would use it not only for storage, but would also build a cow pen and chicken coop that were not visible to our guests. This was David’s only assignment and he had been dragging his feet.
    I had been over at the Hayward’s orchard picking oranges all morning when I returned to see David out in the field with Rachel rather than working on the ground raising project. I placed the bags of oranges by the bunker door and made my way out to have a talk. We could not afford to be charitable to anyone who was capable with such a small group. It was time he knew how I felt.
    As I approached him he jumped up and ran towards me excitedly. It threw me off balance from my intended scolding of him and I instead let him talk. His news was that he had done it, his timing program for the coil gun was now operational. I had dialed the current available to him on the coils way down so that he could use the gun without causing any major damage.
    He had managed to punch a hole in the road sign with only a fraction of the power that I had used before. The thought then occurred to me that if we could somehow scale this up we might have a very formidable weapon on our hands. After returning to the bunker and discussing it with him for hours I started to wonder. If we could really dial the speed of this up, could the alien ships react to it fast enough with their concussion weapons? The speed of a projectile from this gun could potentially far exceed that of a normal bullet or missile. One thing for sure, if it wasn’t successful we would find out quickly.
    For the rest of the day we fiddled with the coil gun and talked about what might be. I had totally forgotten that I had intended to give David a serious talking too. By the time it entered my mind again I was still far too excited about our breakthrough to bring it up.
    With my unique coil design and David’s timing program, I estimated that we should be able to deliver about 85 percent of the power input as power out in the form of projectile speed. A typical BB weighs in at about a third of a gram. Unfortunately, my estimates told me that it would take a tremendous amount of power to send that BB at a speed that would reach a