“We’ve been installing his mesh-networking app on as many phones as we can,” Terek explained. “Like he did New York. With you guys. He’s kinda famous.”
“Kinda?” I was being sarcastic. I’d been there when people asked for his autograph.
Four years ago, through a campaign led by Senator Seymour, Damon had been awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in recognition of his work saving perhaps thousands of lives by encouraging people to install his mesh app during the disaster. He had gone out of his way, and sometimes into harm’s way, back then, and now people were looking to him again.
“His DamonNet website has dozens of requests from groups. He’s explaining how to use a phone attached to a drone as a relay to give wide area voice coverage.”
“Maybe we should leave him here?” The work seemed important.
“It’s all set up now,” Terek said. “He’s created auto-responders on his email, bots that can answer questions.”
“Still…”
Terek said, “No way he’s not coming with you. You’re his family.”
Damon’s dad had taken off when he was a baby, same as what happened to my brothers and me. It was another thing that had bonded us. Damon felt like a kid brother. He always stayed in touch. Sent stuff to the kids for their birthdays, came to visit us on the holidays.
I suddenly felt very proud of him.
“He’s a good man,” I said.
“The best. He’s been a very wonderful friend to me.”
We watched him finish his presentation. The moment he said goodbye, he immediately clicked a button on his laptop and started another discussion group.
I asked Terek, “Can you get your laptop?”
He mumbled, sure, without asking what I needed it for. He brought it over to the granite kitchen countertop, out of sight of Damon’s presentation.
Luke had Ellarose and Bonham busy building with Lego. The leader. Grown up beyond his years.
Terek turned his computer on, then spent a minute shuffling folders before offering it to me. I pulled up a web browser with a map of the Virginia area.
“There are sixteen airports near Virginia Beach,” I said. “That’s where they said Lauren landed.”
“They didn’t give an exact airport?” Chuck asked from over my shoulder.
He’d gone into the garage carrying the boxes from the restaurant, but had returned holding his AR-15 and another gun I didn’t recognize. He laid them out on the dining room table. I glanced at the kids to see if they noticed anything. I had more than mixed feelings about guns. In New York, it wasn’t common for anyone to have one, not in my circle of friends, but further south they were sometimes a point of pride.
“They’re not loaded. I need to clean and get them ready.”
“For what?”
“In case we need them. What’s he doing?”
He pointed at Damon, who was waving his arms in the air in front of his laptop. I explained that he was presenting to the first responders. Chuck was suitably impressed.
“I’ve seen pictures online of detention areas in Virginia,” Terek said.
“You think they put Lauren into detention?”
“Maybe this is not the right word. Processing centers. When they closed airspace, hundreds of planes had nowhere to go, so they had to open airports and make exceptions—otherwise they would have run out of fuel. Messy and improvised.”
He opened another tab on the browser and showed me some articles online.
Chuck had disassembled part of his AR-15. “Why are they detaining people from airplanes?” he said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Unless they’re looking for someone.”
“Or something,” Terek said.
Lots of conspiracy websites were already freaking people out with talk of viruses, but I didn’t see the police or anyone else wearing masks.
“Same as the National Guard we ran into,” Chuck said. “What are they looking for?”
I didn’t have an answer. I found a pen, took some paper from a printer by the window, and began scribbling down the names of roads in the Virginia Beach area and all the locations of the airports.
“I thought you said they sent someone to get her,” Terek said.
“She’s not home yet,” I replied.
“We’ll have you in Washington by tomorrow night,” Chuck said. “We get up at five and leave at first light. Eleven hours of driving.”
“Do we need to go to your cabin?” I was still nervous about going back to that place, as irrational as the feeling was.
“Susie wants me to drop her there. And I want to get The Wolf.”
That was the Range Rover we’d used to escape from New York. “You still have that?”
“It’s been upgraded a little. Can I turn the TV on?”
Damon had finished his presentation and was fiddling with something else. The guy never stopped. Without turning around, he said, “Sure, but keep it down?”
Chuck found the remote on the kitchen counter. The screen opened right onto Fox News—and an aerial view of a nuclear submarine.
“Russia is again claiming that there is radioactive dust in the air near Kashmir,” said a blond news anchor in a corner box, “with Pakistan saying it is uncertain if a nuclear device was detonated or not. India is still denying—”
Susie came out from the garage. “Do we have to have that going all the time?”
“Honey, how else are we going to find out what’s going on?” Chuck returned to taking his gun apart.
“Our nuclear fleet is still able to receive messages via VLF array,” the blond announcer said. “But it is one-way communication. VLF, or very low frequency, waves bounce off the ionosphere and can be received anywhere on the planet. Ships are also equipped with shortwave gear, which can send and receive from almost anywhere on the globe, the same as ham radio operators.”
“But from what I understand, isn’t that analog voice?” a brunette talking head asked. “Analog is ‘in the clear,’ isn’t it? Meaning anyone listening can listen in? Without timing signals from GPS, security of communications from ships have been degraded.”
“Degraded but not gone,” said a man with close-cropped blond hair in what looked like a military uniform. “Even extremely low frequency comms that go through seawater are encrypted. There is no way the military is sending any unencrypted messages to our boats. Nothing important, anyway.”
“Even so, the navy has recalled the Seventh Fleet to Yokosuka in Japan, where the Japanese QZSS satellites—”
“Q what?” asked another talking head.
“The Japanese have two specialized geopositioning satellites in what are called highly elliptical orbits, higher than geostationary orbits, and these are still providing position signal. The Japanese authorities are providing this signal to anyone in the Asia-Pacific region—”
“Everyone. Please,” the main anchor interrupted. “We now have...the US military has raised its threat level to a global DEFCON 2. This is the first time in our nation’s history.”
We were still trying to absorb what was on the TV when Damon stood in front of it. “And those fires? I talked to first responders all up and down the East Coast.” He paused.
“What about the fires?” I asked.
“They’re not only in the Daniel Boone wilderness. People are describing flashes in the sky. Blazes appearing everywhere, and nobody knows why or how.”
CHAPTER 23
“I’M NOT SURE this is a good idea,” I said.
How many times had I repeated this already? More than I could count. Enough that nobody responded anymore.
High noon, and the sun beat down directly overhead. Not a cloud up there, but the Kentucky sky was the color of whiskey, like a keg of bourbon had been poured across the heavens to hide the blue beyond. The flat plains around Lexington gave way to the low rolling foothills of Appalachia, and the haze grew thicker the further north and east we headed.
We hadn’t seen any fires, not yet, but where there
was smoke…
Six hours on the road.
Chuck and Susie and their two kids led the way in the Mini Cooper, with Irena, Terek, myself, Luke, and Damon pulling up the rear in the Range Rover. No way Chuck wasn’t going to lead the charge, even stuffed into the Mini. He was back with his family, which made me want to be back together with mine—whole—that much more.
I’d called the Seymour residence when the sky had lightened on the horizon, about 4 a.m., and the senator had answered but said, no, they hadn’t heard anything. The men they’d sent said they were still trying to find Lauren in one of the collection areas, but there was some confusion. It was a mess over there, he said. They hadn’t found her yet. He said not to worry.
I did.
The traffic all morning had been sparse. A few trucks, and hardly any going in the direction we were headed.
We had left at first light.
Leaving the protective safety of Chuck’s house felt like we were exposing ourselves, like going outside naked when you had a full set of clothes inside. It seemed wrong, and I told Chuck and Susie how I felt.
They wouldn’t listen.
They needed to get to their cabin in the mountains, they said, to which I responded, the same mountains that were on fire? Chuck had a plan, like always. We’d head north up Interstate 40, past Bowling Green, and go on to Lexington. We would skirt the worst of the fires, which had started in the Daniel Boone Wilderness, but were spreading north.
Chuck still maintained that the fires were five hundred miles from his cabin, no fire spread that fast, and anyway, if there was a fire coming, he needed to cut a break so his home wouldn’t burn down.
His plan was to go north until we hit the Ohio River where it branched off the Mississippi. The Ohio wound east. If we stuck close to it, Chuck explained, then even if we did get trapped by fires, we could always take refuge in the river. But we wouldn’t get close to any fires. We would keep going north.
When disaster had struck before, we had stuck together, and there was no way I was going to convince Chuck to leave me with two strangers, as nice and brave as they were, to get to Washington by myself.
Not quite by myself.
“Damon, what the hell are you eating?” I asked.
Chuck had been busy all-night cooking what we’d taken from the restaurant. We packed it all in coolers and stuffed them into the back of the Range Rover. There was more space now, without Chuck in here with us, but Luke and I stayed in the third row, with Damon in the middle. He was busy eating something that looked like milky dog food. Smelled like it, too.
“Psychobiotics,” he replied.
“You mean, probiotics?”
“Psycho.” He took out a spoonful and offered it. “One level up. Did you know that single-celled organisms have control over your mind?”
“Single-track thoughts have control of Chuck’s.”
“I’m serious. All those microbes in your gut, they don’t just make you healthier if you have the right ones. They make you happier. They actually affect your moods and thoughts. I’m trying to keep any edge I can.”
Luke put down his Lego to inspect what Uncle Damon was eating.
“Legook, you want some?” Damon asked.
“That looks gross,” Luke replied.
“I gotta ask. Why do you call him Legook?” I asked Damon.
They exchanged a look, and Damon replied, “It’s a secret.”
I rolled my eyes, but didn’t press. “You got some turkey sandwiches in that cooler?”
Damon nodded. I held his psychobiotic cup of goo while he found one for me and one for Luke.
“Could you turn up the radio?” I asked Irena, who was driving.
Terek had the police scanner on as well. Nothing unusual in the past half an hour. When there was a roadblock ahead, there would usually be chatter on one of the frequencies as the police coordinated. The FM channels were blank, none of the usual soft rock or classical, as many stations had gone offline. What was left were news reports and discussions, more than half of which felt like conspiracy rants.
“DEFCON 1 means that nuclear war has already started,” said a male voice on the radio. “And we are one level below that.”
“DEFCON 1 does not necessarily mean nuclear war has started,” said another voice, this one female. “It means it is imminent.”
“We have never been at DEFCON 2,” countered the male.
“We were at DEFCON 2 in the Cuban missile crisis in ’62,” the female said, “and again with the Gulf War in ’91, and during CyberStorm six years ago.”
“But those were all local. This is the first time we are at global DEFCON 2,” countered the man.
The female acknowledged his point.
I hadn’t even known there was a difference.
The female began talking about how the grocery store shelves in Lexington were empty, that nothing more was coming in, and what was the government doing about it? This was a problem created by the elites, she said, with their reliance on technology and their greed, and now the price was being paid by the average American.
“Can you turn it off?” I asked.
We exited the highway and headed north, to the Ohio River.
This was a slow-motion disaster.
Quiet but relentless.
We couldn’t see the destruction of the satellites overhead. There were no fireworks or explosions. An orange haze engulfed us. Everywhere but nowhere and suffocating at the same time.
Years ago, when I was a kid, we’d had an ice storm in upstate New York when we were on a skiing trip. It sounds dramatic, and the effects were astounding, but it had been gradual.
The temperature hung right around freezing, and it drizzled for a week straight from gray indistinct clouds. No wind. No actual storm. Damp and cold—but exactly the wrong combination of conditions.
Day by day, a layer of clear ice accumulated. First on the sidewalks, and then on the bare trees. Branches slender as a pinky finger became sheathed with coatings of clear ice thick as a thumb, and then the next day as fat as sausages. It was beautiful in a way—entire forests, everything outdoors, all of it entombed in a crystalline covering.
Fascinating, until the weight of it started collapsing the branches.
Then whole trees.
Telephone lines had come down. Then power lines. Even the massive structures that held up the power cables had collapsed. The electricity went out for weeks in some places. Communications cut off in whole regions.
But the whole time, it had been quiet and peaceful.
This disaster we were now living through felt eerily and dismally familiar, the same as others that seemed to happen every few years now. It started with things like toilet paper going empty on shelves. Lines at grocery stores.
On TV, they said that between what people kept at home and what was in the shops, there was about a week of food for everyone. The last of the delivery vans were now making their rounds. There were almost no trucks on the highways.
Chaos was digging its heels in.
Borders were closed. Again.
Air travel stopped.
But it wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. Not exactly.
When that virus had hit a few years before, almost all air travel had ceased. The markets had halted a few times. Uncertainty and panic had set in, but after a difficult few months, scientists and authorities found ways to slow down and stop it. A year or so later, life was back to normal.
How long would it take this time?
A big difference now, was that the military was affected and partly immobilized. During the pandemic, cell phones and communications had functioned. For the most part, those luxuries were now gone.
This time there was also a general call to action for all branches of the military, including the reserves. All local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies were mobilized to maintain law and order. But in rural areas, what did that mean, exactly?
With real information overwhelmed by m
isinformation, it was hard to tell people to stay calm.
Communications between Russia and China and America and India and other nations were mostly shut off from each other. A world that had talked as one was now fractured into parts. Conspiracy theories raged on the internet and radio. Emergency services crippled. Long-range weather forecasting gone. The world’s militaries waiting for threats to emerge from the dangerous fog we found ourselves in.
And all the while, if you stood outside on the lawn of your house, it was quiet. A disaster unfolding peacefully, but I had an uneasy feeling the serenity wouldn’t last much longer.
We had turned off the main highway a half hour out of Lexington, then taken a smaller road up to the edge of the Ohio River, following Chuck’s plan. This was a smaller road, two lanes, and we passed farms and silos that dotted the low hills and green forests. Up ahead, in the orange haze, appeared a collection of pickup trucks on a field and in the road.
“What’s that?” I pointed.
Luke was halfway through his sandwich. “It looks like another roadblock. Is it a roadblock?”
It did look like one. “Terek, anything on the police scanner?”
He shook his head.
I dialed Chuck’s number on my phone, using the mesh app. He picked up right away. “Doesn’t look like the National Guard,” he said. “No police cars either.”
Irena slowed the Range Rover.
As we neared, we saw an improvised barricade of wooden pallets stacked across half of the road. A line of Ford pickups stretched to a low stone fence that demarcated the border between two farms. A green-and-yellow John Deere tractor blocked the way. Chuck and the Mini were a few hundred feet ahead of us, and they pulled to a stop.
Heads appeared over the pallet barricades. Not just heads. Rifle muzzles.
Two groups of four men in beige camouflage fatigues walked from behind the first line of pickup trucks. They split up, one group heading toward us, as Irena slowed to a stop as well.
“Stay on the line,” Chuck said.
I turned my phone to speaker mode and put it on the seat between me and Luke.
Irena rolled down her window.
CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1) Page 15
