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by Kyle Danvers

  An explosion tore through Ashley’s chest, knocking the wind out of her in the kind of way only an impact at high speed could, and forced her to the floor. Seconds later, the ground beneath them shuddered as if there’d been an earthquake and the center’s walls rattled. Dust shook from the ceiling.

  “What the hell’s going on?!” the woman next to Ashley shouted from her hands and knees. It was a damn good question. Ashley vaulted to her feet and stumbled to the nearest window. The sky was like a photo negative, inverted and harsh.

  In the distance, among the mountain range behind the center, a fire roared, and a tower of billowing black smoke merged with the psychedelic sky. On the ground, a mere three hundred yards away from the center, a massive, mangled, and charred shape laid burning. Ashley’s throat tightened at the sight.

  It was the tail of an airplane.

  4

  Joel’s skull roiled as he stirred.

  He looked around slowly, his entire body screaming in pain, and found himself suspended in the cockpit seat with his back parallel to the ground. Fire, twisted metal, and scorched earth surrounded him, and his clothes were torn and blackened with soot.

  The cockpit had been cleaved in two—and the other half was missing. Joel had no idea how he’d survived. The belts across his chest had managed to keep him in place, and though the steel dome of the cockpit had caved in, it hadn’t fully collapsed, which had no doubt kept him alive.

  He tried to shift in the seat, to get out from under the controls that nearly crushed him, and let out a scream when pain seared through his left arm. Heaving, he unbuckled the belts across his chest with his free hand and used it to try to pull his left arm loose, again screaming in pain.

  His arm was trapped, almost certainly broken, keeping him stuck in the chair. He had to get out, had to get away from the wreckage before the fire consumed it and him too. What if there’d been a fuel leak? What if it exploded?

  Panic pierced his chest. He’d survived the crash, but he wasn’t in the clear yet. There was only one way out, and that was through.

  Joel took a series of deep breaths, bracing to try to free himself again. He grabbed one of the belts still dangled across his chest, rolled it up, and clamped his teeth down around it. With one last sharp inhale, he summoned all his strength and pulled at his left elbow, howling through his teeth as his arm slid inch by agonizing inch.

  He slumped back against the chair, tears streaming from his eyes as he tried to will away the white burning at the corners of his vision. He knew he’d pass out if he put his body through much more pain.

  But he had to try.

  Sobs racked Joel’s entire body, sending spurts of pain through his arm as he realized he might die with it stuck in the tangle of metal that used to be the cockpit door.

  When the pain had subsided enough he could see clearly again, Joel braced his right foot against the dashboard and once more wrapped his free hand around his left elbow. Maybe the leverage and added force would be enough. He tried to steady his ragged breathing, tried to prepare for the pain he knew was coming.

  “One, two,” he counted, his body tensing. “Three!” he shouted and used every bit of the strength he had left to pull with his hand and push with his foot—and tumbled backward out of the seat, smacking his head against something hard and cold as he plunged to the hard earth below.

  He screamed from his back and writhed as his body surged with pain, his vision swimming.

  When it cleared once more, Joel’s eyes fluttered open to find the sky still roiling above, as if it were taunting him, sending a warning it would try again to kill him. Joel allowed himself to cry, allowed the burning he felt all throughout his body to run its course.

  He refused to die here. Not like this.

  After he’d gathered his breath, and the pain in his left arm convinced him it wasn’t all some horrible nightmare, he shoved himself up into a sitting position and touched the back of his head.

  He brought his hand around to find it covered in blood, but it was impossible to tell if it was a new injury or one from the crash. He tried to lift his left arm and screamed at the effort. Nothing happened.

  The bones below the elbow might not have gotten broken, but they damn sure felt like they were. Joel's vision spun, and nausea seized his stomach at the realization, but he knew he had to get away from the wreckage if he was to have any hope of coming out of this with his life.

  He’d already defied fate once by surviving the crash—he wouldn’t get another chance.

  Though the pain nearly killed him, Joel managed to turn over to his hands and knees. Each movement of his body, even the smallest muscle tensing, sent shockwaves through his body.

  But adrenaline kept him going, pounding dully at his skull to remind him he was alive and very much wanted to stay that way, so Joel forced himself to his feet and tried not to fall over from the dizziness that swept through him. He’d lost blood, lots of it, and coupled with the agony burning in his left arm he knew he didn’t have much left.

  Joel had no idea where he was. He was surrounded by darkness, save for the flames shooting from the wreckage, and he worried that at any moment it might explode. But he was alive. He sank to his knees and laughed like a madman at the thought.

  No one should have survived a crash like that, but he had. None of it made sense. One moment they were sailing along, without a care in the world, bantering back and forth like it was just another day, and the next moment everything changed.

  With his knees in the fresh dirt, his back warm from the wall of flame just yards behind him, he thanked whoever might be listening he was alive. Someone or something had been watching out for him.

  Whatever had happened, it wasn’t a thunderstorm, and he doubted it’d been a nuclear attack. So then what the hell was it? What else on Earth could have caused an airplane’s entire system to fail? Then it struck him, as forcefully as the impact of the crash itself.

  It must’ve been an EMP, some freak solar storm that’d fried everything. He’d read about the possibility online, which had convinced him to prepare his home for something like it—but his house was hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.

  His heart hammered and his throat tightened. If in fact there’d been an EMP, his airplane wouldn’t have been the only thing affected. His wife and kids were alone, in the dark, totally unprepared. They’d never be able to survive without him.

  It was that fear that propelled Joel back to his hands and knees. He had to get to them before anyone else did. He couldn’t move very quickly, but he could walk—at least until he passed out from blood loss.

  There was nothing and no one around. Not a single house. Joel was alone, save for the darkness and the fire from the wreckage, and maybe some lurking animals who might’ve come to investigate all the noise. And he was operating on borrowed time if the blood seeping out of the back of his head—and the dull tingling coursing through his left arm—was any indication.

  If only he hadn’t insisted on picking up this trip. Regret filled Joel’s stomach along with a weighty sense of dread. If he’d listened to Shelby, if he hadn’t been so eager to put money back in their savings account that they didn’t really need, none of this would’ve happened. He’d be at home in their cellar with Shelby, their kids, and a gun in his hands.

  What if the EMP wasn’t the end? What if it was just the beginning, a tactic by some foreign power designed to knock them all off balance before they swept in and…

  Joel couldn’t afford to think about it.

  He had to get back to his family at any cost. He wouldn’t let anyone or anything get in his way, not even his injuries. If anything happened to Shelby or Cass or Nate; if any of them went missing or were injured...

  Joel shook his head, as much as it hurt to do so. He couldn’t give into despair. He had to keep fighting.

  Every muscle in his body screamed as if it were on fire from the effort of walking, each footstep reverberating through him like an earthquake.
Still, he was determined to find someone or something. He’d survived, and that had to mean something.

  With a renewed sense of energy, Joel started to run, his injured arm held in his better one. There was nothing ahead, but it was better than what laid behind him. He couldn’t see, but it didn’t matter, he just kept running, desperate to put as much distance between himself and the crash.

  He crested a hill and let out an anguished groan when he came face to face with the other half of the cockpit, and Aaron’s body engulfed in flames. A few yards further, the cabin of the aircraft laid burning, casting horrific shades of red and orange across the ground.

  Joel’s vision swam again, this time much worse than before.

  “It should’ve been me,” Joel croaked, clawing at his mouth as he fell to his knees in the dirt, defeated. As much as he wanted to keep going, he couldn’t. Seeing Aaron had taken everything out of him. He stared into the flames, racking his brain for something, anything he could do.

  But it was too late. Aaron was gone.

  Joel tried to stand, tried to force himself to keep moving, but he couldn’t do it. The world itself seemed to have turned upside down and left him without any solid ground to stand on. Instead, he stayed frozen on his knees, watching the flames lick at Aaron in his coffin of steel.

  And then the cabin exploded, sending a shockwave through the air that knocked Joel to his back in the dirt where he landed on his bad arm, crushing it.

  The last thing he saw was Shelby’s face.

  5

  In an instant, Ashley’s world upended.

  As she stared at the flaming tail of the commercial airliner that'd crashed so close to the meditation center she could smell its acrid stench, she thanked her lucky stars it hadn’t landed a few hundred feet closer.

  What the hell was going on?

  A plane had crashed, but was it related to the weird lights in the sky? It didn’t matter. As much as she tried to think of anything else, Ashley kept coming back to the people onboard the plane: the passengers and the crew. Had any of them survived? She had to find out, though she didn’t think anyone else in the center would be willing to join her.

  “What’s going on?” a woman asked, her bottom lip trembling as she gripped Ashley’s arm.

  “I have no idea, to be honest,” Ashley admitted. The sky looked scarier than it ever had, coupled with the fire burning in the mountains where the plane had crashed.

  “We need to stay calm,” Reverend Susan said, all the color drained from her face. Her voice barely carried over the scuffle of people scrambling to get to the windows and Ashley knew as soon as they saw the burning wreckage outside, things would get out of hand fast. She rushed forward and held out her hands to stop them. The less they saw, the better.

  “Don’t panic, everyone!” Ashley shouted, using her best field voice, the kind she hadn’t used in a long time. Surprisingly, it worked, and everyone fell silent almost at once. Their eyes locked on her, looking to her to save them from something they didn’t understand—as if Ashley had any idea what to do to keep them all safe.

  A few moments passed as she searched each of their faces, trying to single out anyone who might act irrationally. That was the last thing they needed in a situation like this. She had to tell them, couldn’t keep it from them forever, but what would happen when she did?

  “There’s been a plane crash,” she said, and a hushed gasp tore through the retreatants. The woman who’d gripped Ashley’s arm clapped a hand over her mouth and started to cry.

  “Oh my god,” she choked.

  “Reverend Susan, where are our phones? Someone needs to call 911 immediately,” Ashley said, grasping at straws. If the power was out, their cell phones weren’t likely to work, but they had to try because they were in the middle of nowhere, and whatever had happened crashed an airplane.

  The realization alone made Ashley’s stomach turn. Had the plane been shot down? Or was it just an error on the part of the pilots, possibly as a result of not being able to see thanks to the weird stuff going on in the sky?

  The basket of phones appeared seemingly from nowhere, and Ashley watched nervously as the retreatants frantically scrambled to understand which phones belonged to whom.

  “Mine won’t turn on,” a tall woman with dark hair said, staring down at her phone helplessly. She smacked it against her leg and held the power button down again. “Yeah, it’s dark.”

  “So is mine,” another said.

  “What?” Ashley asked. That wasn’t possible. Even with the power out, the phones should’ve at least turned on. “Try another one,” Ashley demanded.

  “None of them are working,” Reverend Susan said, her voice empty and distant as she watched the gathering of people all trying to no avail.

  Ashley’s stomach felt like it’d dropped into a pool of ice. If the phones were fried, then they had almost certainly been attacked or exposed to some natural phenomenon that’d short circuited everything.

  A few of the guys in Ashley’s basic training group had mentioned the possibility of an Electromagnetic-something-or-another—a solar surge that could take out the entire country’s electronics and power grid—but Ashley had never believed it could actually happen.

  She realized how wrong she’d been as all the pieces clicked into place in her mind. There’d been a storm and the magnetic field around the earth had gotten messed up somehow. That was the only thing that could explain why the sky looked the way it did, why the plane had crashed, and why none of their phones were working.

  If something like that had really happened, there was nothing Ashley could do for the other retreatants—but she could help the crash survivors.

  “What should we do?” a woman asked Reverend Susan, who looked as panicked as her clients.

  “Stay calm; we’ll get through this together. If we lose our heads, that’s when bad things start happening,” Ashley said. When the others realized what was going on, just how bad it was, Ashley knew no one would be able to keep the peace.

  She didn’t want to be there for that, so she started toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” Reverend Susan asked. “You can’t leave, we don’t know what’s happening out there.”

  “I’m not going to sit here and let people die. If anyone survived that crash, they need our help,” Ashley said.

  “Are you crazy? What if you get hurt? And what if there’s no one left alive?”

  “And what if there is? Who’s going to help them if we don’t?” Ashley asked. “Look, I served in the Armed Forces, I think I can handle myself.”

  The Reverend opened her eyes wide.

  “Then we need you here more than anyone out there might,” she said, her voice low. She fixed her eyes on Ashley and searched her face, pleading.

  “You’ll be fine. Just keep the rest of them calm, and don’t let anyone leave. We don’t know what’s going on out there,” Ashley said.

  “You’re right, we don’t, and that’s exactly why you should stay,” Reverend Susan said. “Please, Ashley. Don’t put yourself in danger.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Ashley said, and without another word, she scooped her duffel bag off the floor and dashed out of the center. Outside, the temperature had gone up several degrees as a result of the fire from the crash, and the sky was still unsettled.

  Ashley stopped to consider it for a moment, and as she watched, goosebumps rippled across her entire body. It was unnatural, or at least it appeared to be, and Ashley didn’t have words for it. She’d been prepared to help handle crisis situations like natural disasters—floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like—but she couldn't have anticipated anything like this.

  She reached her Taurus in a matter of minutes, fumbled with her keys to unlock it, and climbed inside. She closed the door and as she reached for the seat belt to strap over her chest, she found everyone else pouring out of the sanctuary as well. Ashley slammed the door’s manual lock down, just to make sure no one tried to stop
her and jammed the key into the ignition.

  She’d just turned it when one of the women reached the car, her fist beating against the window as the car roared to life. Ashley dared to let out the breath she’d been holding. The car had started, so maybe there hadn’t been a blast or storm or whatever after all. With the power out and phones not coming on, she feared her car wouldn’t start, especially given its age, but good ol’ Tommy the Taurus had pulled through.

  “Take us with you!” the woman shouted, her voice high and panicked as she continued pounding on the window. Following her lead, several other people surrounded the car, blocking Ashley from moving. “None of the other cars are starting! Please!”

  “Move!” Ashley shouted through the glass, stepping on the gas to make the engine roar. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, but if they thought they were going to stop her, they were sorely mistaken.

  “Service before self,” Ashley mumbled, the motto she’d had beaten into her head in training. Though there was nothing she could do for the other retreatants, she knew they would be safe inside the center—if they stayed there.

  She put the car in gear and blasted the horn, scaring the people surrounding her. As they scattered, she slammed the gas pedal and inched forward before they swarmed her again.

  Ashley paused to look around at the other cars. Some of the retreatants had climbed in and tried to start them, but nothing happened. No lights, no engine, nothing.

  A chill rippled across Ashley’s skin, from the base of her skull all the way down to the tips of her toes. Maybe there had been some storm or attack or something. Ashley had never been one to buy into conspiracy theories, but the situation was starting to look less like a conspiracy and more like reality.

  But if there had been an attack or a storm that’d taken out the power, there wouldn’t be any emergency personnel to respond to the plane crash. No one would come to save those people and Ashley couldn’t stand the thought of leaving them to die in the wreckage, so once more she blasted the horn.