SODIUM:2 Apocalypse by Stephen Arseneault Page A

target at ten miles in a hundredth of a second.
    I felt I should be able to scale the coils up sufficiently to deliver that power, but we now had a bigger problem of being able to supply the kind of power needed. With the ultra-capacitors I had, I could only supply about one twentieth of the instant power I needed. We now had a new problem to solve if we wanted our project to become a real weapon.
    It would take a fair amount of time to generate that power with our solar array. And it would take significantly more storage for that power than we currently had with the ultra-capacitors. So, David and I would have to turn our attentions towards power generation and storage of some sorts.
    The hybrid battery I had would provide about one quarter of the energy we needed. We would have to seek more hybrid vehicles to achieve the total power storage required and that would only provide us with one shot. Not a very effective weapon against a multitude of ships. But regardless, we had our next goal set for us and we had nothing but time to achieve that goal.
    The following day I set David back to work on his previous project. It was late October now and our little garden was reaching its end of life for the year. The garden was our largest exposure from the air and we weren’t sure how it would be possible to disguise it.
    We needed full sun to make anything grow and other than allowing some of the weeds to fill in we were stuck with it looking like it was being tended. It was hopefully a small enough target from the sky that it wouldn’t be noticed anyhow. Just as a precaution we decided to make the borders irregular when we would plow it up for the following season.
    We had managed to salvage a couple of freezers and now had a good stockpile of food stashed for our short winter season. I had dug a small pond which we had stocked with bass that we had caught from the lake. We had been fattening them with food scraps from our garden and the fish were flourishing. I kept the pond somewhat clean by pumping some of the spring water into it daily.
    David had managed to make good progress on our undercover city. I could now walk from the bunker to within 50 feet of the garden without ever being exposed. We had all the salvage materials we needed from the surrounding areas and the structure had turned out to be fairly solid.
    Perhaps David was one of those people that were good at having one goal at a time and taking that goal from beginning to completion. I had known others that were simply terrible when asked to multiplex tasks, so much so that they became easily agitated and did a poor job of all. David was evidently one of those single processor individuals, so, I would need to pick tasks for him accordingly.
    With the first phase of our undercover city completed it was decided that another surveillance trip was in order. I was curious if the invaders were still maintaining status quo with their Sodium harvesting. We had been hurried off by the Chlorine the last time out so we had gathered very little intel on the size and capabilities of their fleet, or of their tactics. We were all in need of an adventure just to break the monotony of the daily routine.

Chapter 13

    On our prior excursions we had not seen a need for a camera, but now that we were in the reconnaissance business it was thought that a nice digital camera with a quality zoom lens might come in handy. We would be able to load any images onto the PC in the bunker for further evaluation and discussion. So, before our next trip to the beach we would be scavenging for a camera.
    In our trips into Orlando we had passed a photo shop or two, but had never bothered to explore the remains as they would not have had anything we were in need of. We arrived at the first store about 9 am. It only took five minutes to know there was nothing to be had from it, so we moved on to the next one.
    As David and the girls poked around in the rubble I remembered that a nice hobby shop had been