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There was a time when we used "blackout vehicles" (BVs) extensively. This was shortly after the First West Coast Onslaught, when San Francisco and Los Angeles got pounded into rubble and Chinese troops were infiltrating Northern California in ever-increasing numbers. We all became Freedom Fighters during that moment, and played endless cat-and-mouse with the Chinese forces throughout the coastal mountain range. Because the Chinese had limited air superiority in the form of drones, helicopters and fighter jets, we found that BVs were an effective way to travel at night. We mostly used pickup trucks, but we also used older cars. Most BVs were gasoline-powered, but we rigged some up to run as series hybrids, because they had a low heat signature in all-electric mode.
The first thing we did with any BV was remove any-and-all unnecessary or excess weight. That included windshields, windows, doors, mirrors, carpeting, trunk lids, extra tires, all lights, wiring, hoods, bumpers, insulation, trim, rubber molding, plastic, seats, license plates, dashboard gauges, etc. What we would be left with was a husk of a functioning vehicle - just the chassis and some body panels, the tires, the engine and a driver's seat.
The next thing we did was paint the entire vehicle flat black, inside and out. Then we would beef up the suspension, add off-road tires and max out the engine HP in any way we could -- detaching catalytic converters and smog pumps, adding headers if possible, installing high-end air filters, even adding turbo chargers or superchargers or 4-barrel carbs to older vehicles -- before adding an additional gas tank and welding on lightweight tube bumpers and rails.
Finally, we would have a BV. They were ugly as hell and looked like burnt, home-made dune buggies. But they were very hard to spot at night without night vision gear. The idea was that the BVs could get us around the mountains at high speed. Their only purpose was to transport fighters. They were without armor or armament, and relied on speed alone to evade the Chinese patrols. Everything depended on reducing their weight to a minimum. The drivers wore night vision goggles so they could see where they were going. In the hotter months, some fighters would strip down to shorts when we went on ambush. They'd rub ash into their skin and even go barefoot, just carrying their weaponry and nothing else, because every pound in a BV meant less acceleration, less power. When you had 9 men crammed into a stripped down, souped-up '67 Mustang - 2 in the trunk, 1 on the roof, 3 in the back and 3 in the front, every pound added up and slowed the vehicle down that much more when you had to accelerate or hit the uphill on a dirt fire road.
One problem we encountered with the gas-powered BVs was the engine noise they emitted. Because of this, we took to coasting downhill whenever possible, with engines off. Sometimes we even pushed them uphill. In time, they all became hybrid electrics, but that was much later, after the Dark Days, and by then their role had changed and they were heavily armed battlewagons, not transporters.
At the height of the initial conflict, there were over 500 BVs cruising the back roads and fire trails of the Emerald Triangle. We did tremendous damage, killing thousands of Chinese soldiers in an endless series of ambushes. There were dozens of firefights every night as we clashed and engaged them, then ran away. The rednecks and hippies of Northern California protected their world with every calorie and every drop of blood and courage that they possessed, but the Chinese outnumbered us and their machine guns and RPGs and Air-to-Surface missiles took their toll. The action was so intense that our men and machines sometimes only lasted days, and in a few short months the original BVs were all blown up, their crews either dead, on the run, or hiding out along the high, starved mountain ridges. No matter how many Chinese we killed they kept coming, inexorably infiltrating the mountains, mining the roads, burning down towns and houses, killing every American they encountered, and razing everything in their path until they left total destruction in their wake.
After that, Dark Days set in and famine gripped the land and we resorted to hiding underground and walking and riding mountain bikes and turning ourselves into human bombs and eating the dead, but those are other stories.
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