Protecting Our Home

by Colton Lively

  “Oh, there’s no doubt about that,” he relented. “When I was fifteen, a cellphone was the size of…”

  “A brick?” both children said together.

  “Bigger, maybe.”

  “Well, right now,” Emma said, still stalking the place like a hunter, “I wish it were bigger, so I could see it.”

  Mary appeared at the top of the stairs with Emma’s phone held aloft. “Honey, I won’t ask now, but one day I hope you’ll explain why you need access to Facebook in the bathroom.”

  “Ewww,” Jacob cried.

  “Silence, geek,” Emma said. “Get your over-educated butt in the car. I’m driving.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Mary decisively, reaching at once for the keys.

  “But, Mom…” Emma complained, the one syllable conveying a buffet of frustrations.

  Her mother was adamant. “Not with Jacob in the car. We agreed, remember?”

  “But…”

  “I’m not arguing with you,” she said. “Rules are rules.”

  For the most part, those rules had helped a busy family keep sane and keep together, despite the rush of changes in their lives. Each new school year seemed to throw out new challenges for the teens and parents both, and now Cody and Mary were being forced to contemplate their daughter’s upcoming milestone: the day she’d have legal access to an automobile.

  “We can practice tonight, just around the neighborhood, once you’ve finished your homework,” Mary offered.

  Momentarily resembling a volcano that was fit to blow, Emma carried out a sequence of gestures intended to help gather her “Zen,” as she called it. The rising anger was pressed downward, and large circles with her hands invited in a wave of positive energy. Then she sighed and headed out to the car. “You guys are lucky I’m so calm,” she said over her shoulder.”

  “Sure,” Mary laughed. “Never even a moment of drama. We truly are blessed.” She double-checked Jacob’s bag—the boy was as bright as the North star, but very distractible—and ushered him out. Cody was finishing his own routine, downing the last of his coffee and patting pockets to make sure he had the car keys, workshop keys, and phone.

  “All set?”

  “Yeah,” he said, kissing his wife. “If I can teach a complete novice how to weld in a few days, surely I can keep two teens from murdering each other in the back seat.”

  “And if I can stay on my feet, serving coffee and danishes for six hours, then surely that means someone else is making dinner tonight.”

  “Depend on it,” Cody said at once, always glad of the chance to redress the domestic balance. Why should the woman of the house be detailed with all the cooking? It didn’t make sense to him, no matter how busy he was at the workshop. “I got it covered.”

  “Not steaks,” said Mary.

  “Ah.”

  “Think of something else.”

  “Erm.”

  “Just this once. Surprise us.”

  “With what?” Cody asked, his brain stuck in a culinary rut.

  “Maybe a salad?” she said, tapping her wrist to remind him of the time.

  “If I can’t be made medium-rare, I don’t really know where to start,” confessed Cody.

  “There’s this cool new thing called… the internet. Maybe try that?”

  He kissed her again. “Full of good ideas. See you later.”

  “I love you. Be safe,” she said, as always,

  He was leaving for a day spent surrounded by white-hot metal and people of a lesser skill level, so she would always worry just a little.

  She watched Cody pull the car out of their drive and headed back inside, muttering, “All of you, just please be safe.”

  3

  Flannigan, NH

  H-Hour + 18 minutes (1:18 pm EDT)

  The same confusion remained settled upon Main Street when Cody returned. A line of cars and trucks seemed to be waiting for the light to change, but it was stubbornly dark, and none of the vehicles could have moved, even had they wanted to.

  The old-timer was still investigating his engine and greeted Cody’s pronouncement with a healthy dose of skepticism. “You say it’s caused by a what, now?”

  “Electromagnetic pulse,” Cody said again, more slowly.

  “Magnets? Like at the old iron smelter?” the old man asked.

  “No, I mean,” Cody said, motioning skyward, “up in space.”

  Closing his hood in resignation, the old-timer said, “Son, I don’t know what kind of funny gas you use for welding, but you need to stop huffing it, all right? I’m worried about you.”

  Toby Clark was there, walking from vehicle to vehicle, representing the city council during this morning of the unexpected. “Councilman!” Cody called and ran over to find the rotund, affable former lawyer talking to a young family. “Sir, did you hear anything about what caused this, yet?”

  He actually shrugged, which Cody didn’t find to be a good sign. “Some kind of electrical problem.”

  The genius of politicians, Cody almost muttered. “But it’s affecting everything. The lights, most of these vehicles, our equipment at the workshop… even things that weren’t plugged in have gone dark.” He showed the official his phone.

  “Yeah, everyone’s phone is the same. Old or new, fancy or cheap. How about that?”

  “Well, did you tell someone about it?” Cody asked, desperate for some signs that local government might fill the yawning information gap. “In Manchester, or D.C.?”

  “How?” he said with another shrug. “We gotta wait until the power comes back on. Then we’ll get a readout from the governor, or a statement from the power company.”

  “Where’s our emergency management office?” Cody asked next.

  “Hinchville,” he replied. “I don’t know if anyone’s on staff there today.”

  “Forty-five miles from here, anyway,” Cody calculated. “What about the military?”

  But the councilman had left, heading to speak with other voters who might pose less difficult questions. “This’ll all get straightened out in a half-minute,” he was saying to them.

  Cody turned away angrily, finding Clark yet more pathetic than he’d feared. “Denial,” he said to himself. “There was always going to be denial. But it can’t last.”

  Darius and Sally had tagged along for want of any other way to respond. “I’d call my dad,” she said, “if I could. Right now, is there anything we can do?”

  “Help put out these fires,” Cody suggested, waving to the gray smoke emanating from different locations down Main Street. “Then, stock up on basics, and prepare to leave the town.”

  “Leave?” Darius exclaimed. To him, Flannigan was a bastion of secure predictability; born nearby and schooled closer still, he wasn’t at all inclined to abandon his home. “What about my folks over in Errol?”

  “I don’t know, kid, I’m sorry.”

  “They gotta be worried.” But then he chuckled, “My dad’s probably gonna tell me this burnout was my fault because I welded the electrical system closed or something.”

  “It’s someone’s fault, but it ain’t yours,” Cody said. “Look, I don’t have any answers for you. But I know I need to get to my wife and to grab my bug-out bag.”

  “You mean, you’re prepared for craziness like this?”

  “Craziness, yes,” Cody said. “Like this… well, I can’t rightly say, yet. But that’s what I’m doing. You can come with me,” he said to them both. “Or stay in town and try to help. But this place is going to get ugly.”

  “Why?” Sally asked. “It’s just a power outage, right?” Then she remembered the three big letters Cody had written on the workshop whiteboard. “All right, it’s a special kind of outage, but…”

  “It’s going to bring major changes for everyone. Think about it,” Cody said, even as part of his mind traced the fastest pedestrian route back to his apartment and Mary; she wouldn’t have left for her shift at the Greenleaf Café yet. “Every electrical transformer in the
state is probably fried. Maybe even in the country. You got thousands of tons of mail and vegetables and meat that can’t go anywhere. We’re gonna have hospitals trying to operate without power…”

  “I’m staying for now,” Sally said. “Gonna help out here, then walk over to my dad’s place.”

  “Me too,” said Darius. “I’ll check in on the workshop, make sure nothing weird happens. Maybe try walking to Errol, if I can’t get a ride.” It was fifteen miles, and all of them knew that a “ride” of any description would be a real long shot.

  “You sure?” Cody asked. “It’ll be like Flannigan got transported back to the seventeen hundreds. People are gonna see that their old lives have just gone, and they’ll freak out, probably all at once,” he spelled out. “I’m talking about…”

  There was a faint but distinct noise from the hills to their south. An impact of some kind. A moment later, the ground shook just slightly.

  “What the hell?” Darius asked, seemingly for the hundredth time.

  “If I had to guess,” said Cody somberly, “I’d say that was a plane hitting the ground.”

  “For real?” exclaimed Darius, stepping in the direction of the sound until Cody grabbed his jacket.

  “We can’t go down there, Darius. Ain’t nothing we’d be able to do, anyhow.”

  “But…”

  “Think about it, kid. Everything that was flying, twenty minutes ago, had to either find a way to land without engines, without power, or…”

  “Or crash?” Sally said, shuddering.

  “Those’d be the alternatives, yeah,” Cody decided. “I wouldn’t want to be up there. But it’s gonna get bad, down here, real soon. I’m talking about civil unrest. Lawlessness. People shooting each other in the grocery store. You prepared for that?”

  “Nope,” said Sally simply. “No one is.”

  “All right. I gotta go.” He shook both their hands, wished them luck, then took a deep breath and began walking home. “Almost no one is prepared,” he said to himself. After years of thought and preparation, could “the big one” possibly end up looking like this? A world of stranded cars and unresponsive switches, of radio stations suddenly gone quiet, and TVs that just stared back?

  He left Main Street and crossed the square, taking a dogleg through Flannigan’s tiny commercial district with its handful of upmarket little stores. The quiet struck him, as it had when the incident had first descended on the town, although part of his mind was braced for more distant impacts as airliners succumbed to the chaos. Still, no buzz of chainsaws disturbed the woods, and there wasn’t the usual rumble of traffic on an empty Route 26. People seemed mostly to be sitting indoors, waiting for the TV to revive itself somehow and tell them what the hell was going on. Others were on their front steps or porches, watching for signs of news or change. As he passed, an elderly couple called out to him from their front stoop.

  “Is it aliens?” the woman wanted to know. “It’s them, right? They’ve come at last!”

  Cody couldn’t actually tell if she was joking or not. “How’s that?” he asked.

  “Oh, don’t mind her,” the husband said. “Just idle speculation. She watches too much of that damned History Channel. Ought to call it the ‘Hysteria Channel.’ Just a boatload of meaningless crap,” he spat, continuing what was surely a long-standing argument.

  “Got that right,” Cody muttered and carried on. Kids were playing soccer in the street, unafraid now of approaching cars. He headed for the smart residential area behind the fire station, unable to learn anything from the confused crews; they’d arrived on foot but could only mill around their inert vehicles, responding in pairs to those who’d managed to run to the station in hope of their help.

  Nobody was watering or mowing their lawn, and as Cody came farther away from the town center, he found he was in an almost bucolic silence. It was like walking around on a movie set, an exact replica of Flannigan, New Hampshire, USA, circa 2020, but somehow silenced by an unknown, invisible hand.

  “This,” he said to himself, “is too weird.” The very oddness of the moment unnerved him and spurred his legs into action. “All right. Let’s get there.” At warm-up pace, and then steadily quicker, he covered the remaining ground, running past Emma and Jacob’s old elementary school to find the kids all playing outside while their teachers still clutched cellphones, looking worried. The little park next to the school was becoming a gathering place for the adults who had already arrived to bring their children away. Cody stopped and asked some questions, but no one knew anything for certain. He said “EMP” to a dozen different people but received mostly blank stares. One mother, retrieving her toddler from the bottom of the slide, said to him, “What’s extra-sensory stuff got to do with this? You think some evil genius turned off the power with his mind?”

  It took Cody another minute of running and wondering before he got it. “You thought I meant ESP? Oh, boy…” Educating the public was going to be a major challenge; he could already see.

  His apartment building came into view just as his lungs started to complain, and his hamstrings showed signs of tightening up. “Mary?” he called, almost breathlessly, from the little garden at the foot of the building. He ran up the stairs, his legs coming close to betraying him after three miles. Should have gotten yourself in better shape before Armageddon struck, buddy.

  “Hey, babe!” she said at the door. “You’re home early. Special occasion?” But then she saw his facial expression and knew that he brought dire news.

  4

  The Russell Residence H-Hour + 1 (2:06 pm EDT)

  “You haven’t seen what’s going on?” He hadn’t been this out of breath since that half marathon back in the fall; the last miles had nearly killed him.

  “I put the laundry on, then opened a novel,” Mary explained. “But then Marlene drove over and said they had to close the café today. Some kind of power cut.”

  “Yeah,” said Cody, still getting his breath back. “There’s something big going on. Listen…”

  “Honey, did you just run here from the workshop?” she asked, her tone somewhere between incredulous and impressed. “What happened to the truck?”

  “Same thing that happened to everyone else’s.” He made to explain what he’d found, and his emerging theory of the case, but a commotion outside claimed their attention.

  “It’s Mrs. Wheeler from 3A,” said Mary after returning from the stairwell. “Reckons she’s set to sue the power company, the water company, AT&T, and, oh, the mayor, too…”

  “Mary?” said Cody, resolute now. “We need to talk. Or, actually, and I’m sorry about this, I need you to listen.” He sat her down and gave her the news as straight as he could. “There’s been some kind of nuclear event, high up in the atmosphere, or in space, above the United States.”

  “An event?”

  No need to sugarcoat things, now. “A nuclear explosion.”

  “What?”

  “It’s knocked out just about anything electrical from here to… well, we don’t even know where, yet. It works a bit like a power surge, but a really big one, strong enough to destroy all kinds of circuitry, blow fuses, and start fires.”

  “Jesus…”

  “There isn’t going to be power, not for weeks, maybe months. No public transport, hardly any cars, no deliveries or trains or trucks. No aircraft will be able to fly without major repairs. Everything will be closed. No banks, no shops, no grocery stores…”

  But Mary was tracking backward. “Who did it?”

  “Huh?” Responsibility for the EMP was the furthest thing from his mind; such questions were for the conspiracy theorists to ponder now and for the historians to resolve later. “I dunno, honey. Someone who wants to hurt us, really bad.”

  “Terrorists?”

  “Can’t say. But they’d have to send up the nuclear weapon on a rocket, way up into space. I can’t imagine some bunch of lunatics in a cave managed to…”

  “What about that crazy president
, that dictator guy, over there somewhere, he’s always talking about eradicating us…”

  “No,” Cody said simply. “They haven’t got the technology.”

  “Then… the Russians? Like when we were kids?”

  Just like that, Cody’s patience evaporated. “Mary, focus with me, okay? We need to get the bug-out bag, then get the kids. I’ve got a plan, but I don’t know if it’s gonna work. Right now, I need you to react as though this is real. Pretend there’s been a deadly disease outbreak in Flannigan or something like that, and we need to just bail, right now, grab the kids, and head for the hills.”

  Twenty years of marriage, along with a few floods, two births, and some other panics, told Mary that her husband was absolutely serious. “Okay,” she said, letting other thoughts disappear. “I’ll get the bag. What else will we need?”

  “Food, water. Our camping gear,” Cody said, reeling off a mental list he’d composed during his run home. “Anything you’d usually go to the drugstore to replace. And, you know, whatever girls need.”

  “Roger that.”

  They moved swiftly, as though they had rehearsed the procedure. In the garage, Cody found their four-person tent, the camping stove, and three cans of cooking gas. He shoved everything into the tent bag: their emergency stock of cheap lighters, bug spray, and the four well-worn baseball caps they reserved for hiking. There was a basic water purification kit and some rudimentary fishing gear with a collapsible pole.

  “Mary?”

  “Doing okay,” she called back. “Suitcase or duffels?”

  “Duffels and backpacks. We’ll need our hands free.”

  “Okay.”

  He surprised himself by taking a moment to be proud of her. There’d never been any doubt that she’d step up when the moment came, but the news had come swift and hard enough that anyone would be forgiven for wanting to put the brakes on. Instead, he could hear that she was stuffing clothes into bags, moving from their room to Emma’s, and then to Jacob’s.