In the beginning, Part II...a Baron Kendal story

The CEO of Wiggle exit-interviewed every person who was fired.

His arm was in a sling and he was wearing an eye-patch. Only by dint of superb pharmeceuticals and an iron will was he out of bed. The fact that he could drive around in one of Wiggle’s intelligent, power wheelchairs did not improve his mood.

The coarse-haired razorbacks came out of nowhere. The outer perimeters did not even attempt to take a shot at them. They blew through the fence like it was made of straw.

Once the porcine he-devils were mixing it up with the guests, the humans and hogs were so intermixed that security dare not take a shot.

The smell of human blood had the same effect on the porkers that it had on sharks. It put them into a feeding frenzy courtesy of all the fresh road-kills that Kendal had sometimes fed them.

The CEO had his best people attempting to track down the perp. The truck had a salvage title, that is it had been deemed “scrap”. It had been purchased with cash from a junker near Roswell, New Mexico. The plates were stolen.

The ancient vehicle didn’t shake-hands with WIFI or satellites. By driving back-roads and trailering fuel, Kendal easily slipped through the electronic, picket fence.

The CEO had to farm out the analysis of the pack saddles. Wiggle had no mechanical expertise in-house.

The sandwichboard-like pack saddles were Claymore mines. The plastic explosive that was the peanut butter in the sandwich had been pressed into fishnet stocking material to form a hexagonal pattern of channels on the surface before being mated to the 5mm thick, steel outer bun. LS DYNA-3D simulations indicated that every hexagon would self-forge into a tear-drop shaped projectile with a velocity of 5000 feet-per-second. The consultants predicted a LD50 range of 100 meters to either side of each hog.

The canteen-like pack saddles were air-fuel bombs. The payload was simple ether, the same material available in every auto supply store as starting fluid. The driving propellant was home-made black powder. The consultants predicted a LD50 range of 25 meters in the open or 10000 square meters in an enclosed space...for each hog.

The pack saddles were complete and functional in every detail except….there were no primers in the suitcase handle firing mechanisms. Instead, there was a note. “Next time these will be armed.”

Each pack saddle also had a copy of a manifesto.

California Condors are a protected species. They have nature preserves and laws were written to protect them.

Mojave Tortioses are a protected species and they have their own nature preserves.

Pacific Salmon have protected waters to spawn in.

Even smelt in the Sacramento delta are protected and technology is "rolled back" to protect them.

The manifesto demanded that the vast, virtually un-populated region between the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Mississippi river be “non-digital” as a nature preserve for men and women who would otherwise disrupt the hive.

Benchmarks were listed, including the “fuzzing up” of Wiggle Maps for the region. Failure to meet the benchmarks would result in more attacks.

The CEO rejected the demands out-of-hand. Having a sense of the perp’s mode of operation, the CEO was certain the perp would be found and any future efforts detected and neutralized.

The CEO was wrong.

Kendal was the vanguard of thousands of disenfranchised people. The weapons had been moved into place before Kendal's attack.

Some of the weapons were goats peacefully grazing in the hills west of San Jose.

Some of them were Africanized honeybees which had been placed in hundreds of locations across California, just waiting for a whiff of pheromones before launching clouds of 50,000 kamikazi bees.

Even a woodchuck had been pressed into service. A pound of coarse, home-made black powder is not a great deal of explosive power and would rarely be a concern to the class of people who travel in private jets between the east and west coasts of the country.

A pound of coarse, home-made black powder, rammed down a woodchuck hole and pressed firmly into contact with the outside of a concrete swimming pool in Westchester County, New York...and then tamped in with wet bentonite is an entirely different animal.

Shock waves traveling by air quickly attenuate. Air is compressible and quickly dissipates the energy of the blast.

Water is a whole different animal. Water is incompressible. The forces transmitted are analogous to a hammer hitting a tennis ball (which is filled with air) versus the sharp crack of a hammer hitting an anvil. Human bodies partially submerged in water are resistant to compressive shock as long as the rib cage is out of the water. Conversely, when the rib cage is submerged, the air within the lungs compresses, the sharp ends of ribs that are fractured in multiple places stab into the lungs and death quickly follows due to bleeding out and/or loss of pulmonary function.

The Labor Day, pedophile, pool party in Westchester was epic in more than one sense. Hell received a bumper crop of warped souls that day.

It took a while, but eventually the powers of SMANGS came around to Kendal’s way of seeing things.

They started remembering nephews and nieces who struggled to fit in. Nephews and nieces who could thrive in the Aisle of Misfit Toys.

Though few of the digital glitterari would admitted it, there were sons and daughters (legitimate and otherwise) who would also fit in the AOMFT Nature Preserve better than in the great hive.

Ethernet cables were allowed to fail and were not repaired.

Traffic cameras that were used for target practice were not replaced.

With the exceptions of Denver, Vail and Jackson Hole, the wasteland was abandoned by the high-entropy, digital royalty.

And a man known as Baron Kendal, boyish of mien and sinewy of build rode the land seeking only peace, justice and the (traditional) American way.