To Cross a Wasteland

by Phillip D Granath

  “Because it means answers, something we have been short on all of these years,” Miles replied in an even tone. “And without those answers how can we expect to fight this?”

  “Fight what?” Kyle asked. “How do we fight starvation or thirst? How will answers keep people from killing each other over a mouthful of rat meat?”

  “I mean to fight this darkness, Kyle. This death shroud that is covering everything and everyone. The first step in every process is understanding and truth. Knowing why you have to do something. A junky understanding why he has to get clean. A doctor or even a patient understanding why a limb must be amputated. It all starts with the simple understanding, the why of the thing,” Miles said his own anger picking up now.

  “Kyle, do you remember the rally in the park. The day that City Councilman, that Neal, told the people of our plan, my plan. It started with the why. Explaining to everyone that the water tower would go dry in a few weeks if we didn’t act,” Miles lowered his head rubbing his temples. Kyle knew that day had been one of the high points of the old man’s life.

  The old engineer had figured out a way to retrofit the massive steam-powered water pump in the museum to pump water up from the town’s deep well. That had been the easy part, getting the 30-ton steel monster moved to the other side of town had been the hard. The lights had been out for 3 months at that point, things were starting to get ugly as true desperation began to set in. The rally had drawn everyone in the town together. It had been the high point of the City Council’s strength; the organized body had given the people hope in a very frightening time. Hundreds of people crawled from the wreckage of society and moved the pump over three painful days. They did it just like the ancient Egyptians would have. With lots of rope, toil, and sweat. They used lengths of steel pipe to roll the behemoth across town, laying them down segments in front and picking them up from behind.

  It was one of these pipes that had slipped free and crushed Miles’s leg when the massive weight had shifted unexpectedly. The old man had refused to leave the job site. Refused to leave the project in anyone else’s hands. Not even on the third day when it finally arrived at the base of the tower or over the next two as the pipes and fittings were connected. Mile’s was running a fever when the pump was first fired and was unconscious by the time the water started to flow. They didn’t have a doctor then, just a lot of folks with good intentions and a basic understanding of first aid. So Mile’s leg was splinted and bound tight when it should have been amputated. Years later Anna would tell him it was a miracle he had lived through it. The leg had healed wrong, shattered bones grew back together at odd angles, the muscles and ligaments deforming over time. Mile’s greatest triumph had earned him a useless limb and a lifetime of perpetual pain.

  “Miles you saved this town. Everyone in it would have died of thirst that first year, either right here or out there in the desert trying to walk out of this place,” Kyle said and then added. “You, me, the Council, no one could have known what that bastard would do.”

  Miles shook his head in reply and took a breath. He looked at his friend and gave a weak smile.

  “The map was just the first thing I wanted you to look at, there is more,” Miles said turning to pick up a hand full of papers from a pile near the whiteboard. If the old man had an actual system of organization, it was a mystery to Kyle.

  Miles handed the stack of papers to the Scavenger, Kyle thumbed through them briefly. It seemed an odd assortment of magazine clippings, newspaper articles and pages ripped from what he guessed were textbooks.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Everything I could find on space habitats, the International Space Station and the interiors of the old shuttles. I put it together when I was researching your little trip,” Miles replied. “I want you to look over it all very carefully, there are lots of photos, but I want you to read the articles as well.”

  “Why?” Kyle asked as he took a seat at one of the folding chairs.

  “I want you to look for anything that even remotely resembles that light. Maybe we can learn something about it. Who made it, what it’s for, anything would be a start.”

  Kyle began to flip through the papers, the first article was about the deteriorating Russian space program and showed pictures of the mothballed Soyuz capsules.

  “I’m going to review,” Miles said, reaching up and flipping the whiteboard over to display the back side.

  Kyles was suddenly glad to have the papers to distract him, he had been through this lecture to many times already. The back of the whiteboard was covered with writing, most of it in two distinct columns. It was the accumulation of Mile’s “Investigation” into the great mystery. The old man would review the entire board regularly, speaking out loud everything he had written. He claimed it help him to think. Kyle thought that he had simply run out of new evidence years ago and was just afraid to admit they were hopelessly stuck.

  “So,” Miles said clearing his throat. “Known facts. The skies begin to glow with a blue light. The phenomenon was reported worldwide,” Miles had made a quick note next to this line. Only the Americas can be confirmed.

  “The light reportedly varies in intensity, but seems to dramatically increase over the space of approximately 90 minutes,” Miles paused and glanced at Kyle. The younger man had always argued that the light had lasted an hour exactly, but with a wide variation in time from everyone he had spoken with Miles had chosen 90 minutes and the word “approximately” to make the statement more general. It had been an argument that Kyle had stopped caring about years ago.

  Miles continued. “The light ends abruptly, and all electronics cease to function,” The statement used to read melts, fries or otherwise fails, but Miles again felt that didn’t sound scientific enough. The old man again wrote next to it. Only the Americas can be confirmed. He then paused and added. Electronic failure estimated >99%.

  “I guess we can no longer assume total failure, your light proves that,” Miles said turning his head to glance at Kyle.

  “I guess so,” Kyle responded only half listening as he read an article about the astronauts personal living space on board the shuttle.

  Miles studied the three lines for a moment and then nodded, satisfied that he had fully encompassed all of the known facts. Kyle shook his head in disgust. Whatever it was had driven a whole world back into the stone age and cost probably billions of lives, yet all they really knew could be packed into three short sentences.

  “Moving on to hypothetical causes,” Miles said. This area of the board had changed wildly over the years but now was broke down into two separate areas. Man-made event and Natural Occurrence.

  “Man-made event,” Miles began “First up, EMP.”

  The term Electromagnetic Pulse had meant nothing to Kyle when Miles had dragged him into this two-man think tank. But in many ways, it had been their prime suspect for years. A man-made pulse of energy that fried electronics. Bam, case closed Kyle had initially thought. It turned out things wouldn’t be that easy.

  “Can only be generated on a large scale by the detonation of a nuclear device,” Miles read the next line, it was followed by a series of notes. No reported nuclear blasts. No reported fallout. No signs of radiation poisoning or nuclear winter. Kyle mentally piled on his own questions. Who could have done it? Who had enough nukes to saturate the globe? The list was short as far as Kyle’s 11TH-grade social studies background went. The U.S., Russia, and maybe China, but that didn’t make a lot of sense to use as a weapon on everybody, including yourself. Kyle remembered the news mentioning both those places specifically that night. And if one of them had been behind it, where were their troops? What’s the point of knocking an adversary into the stone age unless you were going to take advantage of it?

  After that the theories got a bit more outlandish the further one read down the list. Starting to sound more sci-fi than sci-fact. “A Secret Weapon,” Miles read aloud. “A weapon previously unknown to the public," this one alwa
ys made Kyle shake his head. He had argued for its removal several times in the past.

  “I’m telling you again, it doesn’t make any sense. If you had a weapon like that, one that could turn the world on its head with the flip of a switch. Why keep it secret? The old superpowers didn’t build Nukes to use them, they built them, so they didn’t have to use them,” Kyle said looking up from his pile of papers.

  “A nuclear deterrent so to speak, just not nuclear,” Miles added not looking away from the board.

  “Exactly, you would want everybody to know you had it, so you could hold it over the head of the whole world. I carry this magnum everywhere and let people see, not because I want to shoot anyone but to show people that I could. For the most part, it keeps people from messing with me,” Kyle said, knowing just because Miles agreed with his reasoning didn’t mean he would erase it from the board.

  “Forget the why maybe it was a mistake, or maybe some crackpot got a hold of it and set the range for everywhere. To me it always comes down to power,” Miles said, that argument had become the sticking point for several of these theories. Unfortunately, it was an area that neither men had enough education in. Miles’s blue-collar railroad experience and Kyle’s lack of higher education had left them completely unprepared to delve into large-scale electrical theory. The two men had agreed on one point though.

  “The amount of energy would have to be ridiculed. To cover the whole globe and to do it for over an hour,” Miles said.

  “Well now, even for exactly a danged old hour, it would have to be like a bazillion of them their volts or Joules, or what have yous, a whole lot of bunches,” Kyle said cracking his best backwoods hillbilly accent.

  Miles looked at him and frowned. “Agreed, in theory. Moving on.”

  “An accident or experiment,” Miles read.

  “Same problem, power,” Kyle said his head down and reading again.

  “Agreed, power would be the problem, but there are a few suspects,” Miles responded by pointing to the next two notes underneath. The first read, Fusion Experiments, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, CA. The note beneath that read, Large Hadron Collider, Switzerland EU.

  “Yeah, but according to the only references we can find on them, Livermore hasn’t been able to ever produce more power than they use. It seems kinda unlikely a breakthrough or accident would suddenly produce that kind of power and for a completely unknown side effect fry everything powered by electricity on the whole planet,” Kyle said, giving up on his reading, feeling very much like a petulant student.

  “And while some folks theorized the Collider could potentially create a black hole centered in Europe, nobody seems to have ever guessed it could create energy. It seems it was only ever good at using it up,” Miles added. They had a lengthy newspaper op-ed speaking vehemently against the continued use of the collider. It cited the creation of a black hole near the top of the list of reasons why not to use the device, but blue world enveloping electronics destroying side effects had not been mentioned.

  “Can we move on?” Kyle asked he had finished reading through the pile in front of him.

  “I think so,” Miles replied sounding tired. The old man pulled one of the chairs up close to the board and sat down heavily, his leg must be paining him already Kyle thought.

  “Natural Occurrence,” Miles read aloud.

  This hadn’t even been a consideration to the two men until Miles had stumbled across a copy of Deep Space Magazine a few years ago. It had referenced something called the Carrington Event. A quick Encyclopedia Britannica search had them reorganizing their board and re-questioning their thought processes entirely.

  Carrington had been a British astronomer and had documented a huge solar flare in 1859, larger than any flare recorded before or since. For two days’ auroras danced across the skies at night, some reportedly as far south as Africa and Mexico. The “modern” electronics of the age, namely the telegraph went nuts. With machines operating without power, telegraph lines in some area reportedly smoked and, in some cases, even caught fire. Similar solar flares, though not nearly on the same scale occurred in 1921, 1960 and 1989. In every case, electronics had been either disrupted temporarily or knocked out entirely. Though the damage seemed to be limited to certain regions. The 1989 flare had knocked out power across most of Quebec but caused only minor disruptions everywhere else in Canada.

  “It still makes the most sense,” Kyle said, not for the first time.

  “In many ways, yes it does,” Miles admitted. “But the facts just don’t seem to fit, at least not enough to be certain.”

  Kyle let out a deflating sigh. Here it was the point of the exercise that they always reached and never seem to get past.

  “Miles what more could you want? These solar flares, they happen without warning. They fill the night sky with pretty lights, and they destroy the modern world as we know it. If this was a T.V. cop drama, it wouldn’t make it through the first commercial break. Case closed, roll the previews for next week’s episode,” Kyle said, pleading for reason.

  “And what does every good mystery novel always have? A twist at the end. Something the reader never sees coming, if it’s a good one, and son, this one's a doozy,” the old man said turning to face Kyle.

  Damn him, Kyle thought, using printed literature to undermine his sitcom based arguments.

  “Just look at all of the points that don’t fit,” Miles continued. “There is no way what the whole world saw that night could be called an Aurora. I have piles and piles of pictures and descriptions of Aurora Borealis. They didn’t just show up unannounced, people tracked these things. They don’t turn on for an hour and then off again as if someone through a switch. They don’t burn in one color and with such an intensity that they can be seen even in daylight. They don’t cause modern electronics burn up.”

  “But Carrington…,” Kyles said pointing to the board.

  “Was a onetime event. Something never seen before or since, an aberration,” Miles cut him off raising his voice.

  “And why not?” Kyle demanded. “Why couldn’t it have been a one-off, sorry better luck next millennium, if your species makes it that long, world-killing event?”

  Both men turned back to the board. The last line read simply, Unknown.

  “It always comes down to the same answer, doesn’t it? Unknown,” Kyle said bitterly.

  “The day we stop coming up with unknown, will be the day we find the answer,” Miles replied.

  Kyle looked at his friend as the old man continued to stare at the notes on the board. More and more Kyle began to realize how much Miles needed this. This hopeless quest for an answer. His pump had first saved and then enslaved the whole town. Miles felt responsible for that. It probably didn’t help that he still helped Murphy’s men operate and maintain the damned thing, much to the old man’s shame. Those chits kept him and Juan alive, and he used them to buy books and magazines from everyone that he could, his research material. His only drive now was for redemption. A last great achievement to expunge his role in murphy’s wrongs, the solving of humanity’s last great mystery.

  “I’m going to go now, but I’ll be back soon enough,” Kyle said.

  Miles turned and smiled at the younger man, then returned back to his board and its mystery.

  As Kyle made his way back through the museum’s maze of machinery, he felt guilty. He had intended to tell Miles the entire tale. To tell him about the odd late night attack. The raiders, if they had truly been raiders, but after the way, the old man had reacted to the news about his discovery of the light Kyle had decided to hold off telling that part of the story. One mystery was enough for today.

  He knew what would happen now. The old man would feverously research and stew on the light in the cave, and then the next time Kyle visited he would ask Kyle to go out and try and retrieve it again. This time armed with proper tools, hacksaw blades, a bigger pry bar, whatever Miles could scrounge up. That’s when Kyle would tell him of the attack. That th
e cave was apparently frequented by raiders. That should dissuade the old man’s insistence that he trek back out there, or at least Kyle hoped.

  The Scavenger stepped out into the street, the sun was dipping down low towards the horizon. He would go to Murphy tonight. He would make what hopefully would be his final trade with the councilman turned crime lord. Then would come the dangerous part, convincing Anna.

  Rangers

  Coal walked the streets with a confident stride, his head was high and his eyes straight ahead. His reputation was his protection more than anything, anyone that recognized the Indian would know to avoid him, while his very walk told everyone who didn’t, everything that they needed to know. It said, “This is not a man to fuck with.”

  The Indian’s thoughts though were anything but confident. The City Council was done; its authority had been in a long steady decline since Murphy had made his move. Coal’s relationship with them had always been strictly business. Coal had always gotten the impression that they didn’t much like him and that somehow his work was beneath them, that the very fact they needed to hire him went against the council’s moral fiber or something like that. He had done a few jobs for other people in the past.

  Rincone had hired him a few years back to go after a group of street toughs that had killed a few of his men. The Black Jackets usually took care of those kinds of matters in-house. But these toughs had quickly realized what kind of trouble they had stirred up and beat feet for the desert. Rincone didn’t have enough men to go out after them and keep up the town’s “Policing.” So he hired Coal. The Indian had found the small group squatting in an old motel, not three miles outside of town the next day. The group found their heads resting on Rincone’s desk the day after that.

  Rincone’s move, now that had been the real surprise. The man was definitely ruthless enough to hang the City Council out too dry, the fact that he managed to run the Black Jackets demonstrated that. Coal just didn’t think the man would have ever really wanted to make a power play like that. Cutting out the Council and stepping out from beneath their moral high ground, their sense of legitimacy. The more Coal considered it, the more it didn’t sound like Rincone at all. The man loved his position as the “Chief of Policing,” hell even the bounty letter he handed Coal for the job had been titled, WARRANT FOR THE DEATHS of.