Sahuaro Highschool, South Camino Seco
August 8th, 2023 0829 hours
Officer Lopez
Officer Lopez was working as the local resource officer for Sahuaro Highschool when the first nuke was intercepted in the sky above. Having previous military experience he knew immediately what was happening and began ushering every student that was arriving at that time into the gymnasium of the school. He was inside trying to calm the youths when the one that got away streaked overhead. One of the students called out about it which drew his attention to the open door. He rushed over in time to watch the next one explode in the air, releasing a powerful electromagnetic pulse.
In the following hour he found himself organizing the students that stuck around to complete simple survival tasks to keep them busy. Several of the teachers helped in the organization, though everyone was anxious to return to their homes to their parents. A few had been retrieved by parents that happened to live in the nearby neighborhood. Most children’s parents were on their way to work, stuck in traffic when the EMP went off and he wondered if they would ever see them again.
He had been attempting to calm a gaggle of freshmen girls when he heard a massive gunfight break out down the street. He ran to the exit door where a pair of the older boys were standing lookout, staring down the street towards the sound of the gunfire.
“Sounds like someone just knocked off the Circle K, whaddaya think, Officer Lopez?”
He looked at the young man asking him the question, then looked down the street congested by disabled vehicles and gave it some thought, “More likely the CVS.”
“What would someone want at a CVS?”
“Drugs. Lots of drugs.” The man’s friend voiced the answer Officer Lopez was going to speak himself.
“Your friend is probably right. The bums will loot the Circle K for the booze, though it’s not likely to come to lethal force. Only druggies start shooting over drugs.”
Officer Lopez considered whether to go investigate or not when one of the teachers came up to look down the road with them, “You gonna check that out?”
“I want to, but I don’t want to leave you guys alone.”
The teacher looked around the gym at the roughly eighty students and teachers that remained, “We’ll be fine. We have a large group, I don’t think anyone will mess with us here. Just hurry back, ok?”
Lopez nodded in understanding before heading out on foot in the rising Arizona heat. The CVS was about a half mile from the school on the corner of Camino Seco and Speedway Blvd. He set off at a light jog, cursing the weight of his duty gear; a ballistic vest, radio (which currently wasn’t working for obvious reasons), pepper spray, taser, and nine millimeter pistol with four extra magazines.
Long before he’d reached the corner of Speedway and Camino Seco it seemed the gunfight had ended. Along the way he’d seen several men, women, and children hurrying away from the battle. He directed everyone to the highschool as he passed and gathered as much information about the situation as he could. From what he gathered one armed group entered the CVS, another followed soon after and shooting ensued. By the time he reached the crossroads it was a ghost town with death looming overhead in the background.
He rounded a turned over box truck, pausing to look in at the bloody, dead man inside, then hiked the remaining distance to the entrance of the CVS where a pair of bodies were splayed out in front of the entrance. He drew his pistol and stalked carefully around the bodies while taking a quick glance around before entering the foreboding darkness of the store. He found two more bodies just inside, covered with sheets. Before inspecting them, though, he moved to clear the rest of the building when he came upon the last body just inside the back hall.
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Satisfied that the building was relatively secure he checked the last body first, noting that he was face down with a gaping wound in the back of his head. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and carefully pulled the man’s head back only to gasp at who he found.
“Greg Smythe. Got ambushed. Then executed.” Officer Lopez muttered to himself noting the burn marks on the wound to his forehead. “So the fella’s up front must be your brothers.”
Huffing to himself he moved to the next set of bodies, those covered by a sheet. His mind quickly puzzled out the reasoning before he pulled the sheets back. Under one was the now dead pharmacist who’d bled out from three random shots to the gut, and a pretty teenage girl who took one to the pump-works. Upon further inspection he could see where the initial shooting happened by the amount of blood that had been dragged across the carpet of the store to where the two bodies now lay.
Stepping around the blood splatter, his mind unable to give up the habit of crime scene preservation, he stood in the doorway staring at the next body, that of the young man that had his brains blown out the front of his face. “That’s the one that started it. Probably Zeke, the youngest brother.” He looked over to where the bodies of the workers were and noted the copious amounts of 5.56 casings littering the floor.
“And that dude, wherever he is, returned fire. So how did you buy it?” He asked no-one in particular as he observed the body slumped against the blasted pillar it had attempted to use as cover. Looking to his right he saw several spent shotgun shells. With the scene firmly playing out in his mind now he decided to confirm his version of things by checking out the last body.
He saw immediately that this man, which he assumed was Earl, hadn’t died from the multiple gunshot wounds he’d taken. Someone had decided to save the bullets and put him down by slicing open his neck. Judging by how deep the cut was, the man who did it was pissed. Any deeper and he might as well have staked the man’s head to a pole. The shotgun blast to the stomach would have finished him eventually,considering he hadn’t seen a single EMT crew in the time since the nukes went off.
He looked back into the store taking in the gunfire shredded interior with a heavy sigh. He stepped back in quickly to grab a cool bottle of water from the now non-functioning cooler then stepped back out, unsure of where to go or what to do. He was about to start walking back to the highschool when he heard several footsteps coming his way from the direction of the nearby church.
An elderly man and woman peered around the corner of the building to his left with an audible gasp. They looked like they were about to run away when they saw him standing there drinking his looted bottle of water, as harmless as can be.
“Uh, did you do this?” the older gentleman asked hesitantly.
For the first time in the last hour and a half, Officer Lopez smiled, “Nah. I was late to the show.”
“You gonna do anything about it. I think we saw the guy responsible headed down Speedway towards Harrison. Had a young girl with him. She was wounded.”
Officer Lopez thought for a minute at what the man said, “He have an AR?” It was the logical conclusion that the man who fought back had such a thing.
“That one of them assault rifles? I think so, it was brown though, not black like the ones you see on TV.” The woman responded.
He swished the water around in his mouth before swallowing, then took another swig from the bottle. After a moment lost in his thoughts, the older gentleman urged him to respond, “So? You gonna go run him down?”
“Nah, short of it is that all these guys left out to rot were part of a local family of meth dealers. I had been trying to catch them in the act. I figure they got what they deserved and we don’t need their like roaming the streets with that kinda shit looming over our heads.” He pointed to the billowing mushroom cloud in the distance to punctuate his point.
“He’s got a point, Bill.”
“I suppose, anyway, you gonna arrest us if we help ourselves?”
Officer Lopez laughed, “Nah, have at it. Most of that stuff caught some bullets, but the fridge is still cool. Won’t stay that way.”
He began to walk away when he noticed a red-eyed ‘Momma’ Smythe staring at him and the elderly couple with hate in her eyes from just across the street. She looked back towards the next set of apartments down the road where a small group of lightly armed people were disappearing into the inner sanctum of their complex. He could see a pair of men with rifles ushering them inside with their hard earned loot. When he looked back, he saw Mrs. Smythe retreating back to her own apartment complex, stabbing her walking stick into the concrete as she went.