by Hunt, Jack
They arrived in Ryerson sometime after eight, expecting to see the town in flames but besides a couple of buildings the damage was minimal. They quickly made a beeline for Cayden’s business on the north side. Cayden Harrington ran a bar called Harrington’s. It was nothing more than a façade that covered his illegal operations; the main source of income came from drug distribution. He was the go-to guy for drugs for many in four counties. A smart individual, he never got his hands dirty and always let others do the grunt work. As they swerved the Beetle around the back of the bar, Russ noticed four guys unloading survival gear into a garage and rolling a collection of ATVs off the back of three old beat-up trucks. He always had his hands in a variety of things but that was strange even for him. The ATVs would be of no use to him now. Had they worked they wouldn’t have carjacked that Beetle. Cayden was outside giving directions. He glanced their way and cupped a hand over his eyes to block the glare of sunlight.
Cayden was an imposing man, close to six foot with a fierce beard, and military buzz cut. Some said he’d been a Marine at one time but others dispelled those rumors as nothing more than hot air from a man trying to inflate his ego. Cayden relished the mystique around him and had always fancied himself as some kind of Godfather figure.
Growing up Russ had looked up to his uncle, admired the way he’d walk into a room and be treated with respect. He had this wicked tattoo of a lion on his neck that stretched down beneath his shirt, and he always wore a flat gray cap. Today he was wearing a dark navy peacoat, tight jeans and black boots.
“Let me doing the talking,” Russ said looking over at Morgan who had a tendency to put his foot in his mouth. They got out and Cayden made his way over but not before bellowing out a few more orders.
“Throw some tarps over the ATVs and get them inside.” He turned towards Russ and extended his hand like he often did, bringing him in for a pat on the back. “What have we got here?” he said admiring the Beetle.
“Picked it up on the way through. Not many vehicles out there working.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell is happening but we press on, business as usual. So. How did it go? You collect the goods?”
He sucked his bottom lip in and looked over at the others. “That’s the thing.”
“Russ.”
“The plane went down. We were there but that’s when the lights went out.”
“So you followed it and collected my shit?”
“No.”
“What do you mean no?”
“Cayden. Look around you. There’s no power. Vehicles aren’t working. The roads are clogged with people. Buildings are on fire.”
“And business will continue,” he said as if none of that mattered. “This is just a glitch. What, you think I’m closing down?” He turned towards the garage. “You see all that? That’s so business can continue even while this shitstorm is being dealt with.”
“But what if it’s not?”
“Not what?”
“Being dealt with.”
He laughed and put a hand around his neck and pulled him forcefully away from the others. “Please tell me you saw where that plane went down?”
“It went past us and disappeared somewhere in the Pisgah National Forest.”
“Then why the hell are you here?”
“What?”
“You should be out there looking for it.”
Russ looked back at him, mouth agape. “Cayden, first, we have no idea where it could be and second, even if we did know, your cocaine is probably scattered all over the mountain.”
Cayden led him out of view of the others and threw him up against a wall, then wrapped his hand around his neck and began squeezing while attempting to lift him off the ground. “For your sake that better not be true.”
“Uncle. Please,” he spluttered, hoping to snap him out of his deranged state.
Cayden released him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I want you to find that plane.”
“But with the storm. It could be anywhere.”
“Then I guess you’ll be busy for the next few weeks.”
He couldn’t believe what he was asking.
“But how? Where do we begin? The forest has thousands of acres.”
Tommy and Morgan walked around the corner; they’d been eavesdropping. Like a concerned friend, or just trying to impress Cayden, Morgan threw in his two cents. “I think I know how we can find it.”
Cayden gave him a stern look. “How?”
“You gave Dustin a personal locator beacon, right? Just in case he had to come down in a different area or just in case things got hot and he had to cut off communication.”
Russ knew where he was going with this but it was pointless.
“It won’t work,” Russ muttered. “In theory it’s a good idea but all electronics have stopped and besides, those things only have a 30-hour battery runtime. It’s been far longer than that,” Russ said as he rubbed his red neck.
Cayden jumped in. “I don’t give a shit. You had one job and that was to collect the drop, you still haven’t done that so I want you to get out there and find it.”
“But uncle. You don’t understand.”
He shouldn’t have said that. Cayden threw a punch into his gut, his legs buckled and he dropped to the ground. “No, you don’t understand. I want my twenty keys.”
“I have a rough idea where the plane went down,” Tommy piped up, trying to come to his aid. Cayden looked at him unconvinced after what Morgan said.
“Oh yeah? How?”
Tommy continued. “It’s simple math. Based on our location, altitude, speed, and the direction it was heading. I might not get an exact location of the crash but I can figure it out. I just need a map.”
Now had it been anyone else, Cayden might have called bullshit on it but Tommy was generally considered an intelligent man even though he’d dropped out of college. He could see Cayden chewing it over. He released his grip on Russ and backed up. “Then why are you standing around? Get to it!” he said walking away from them. Tommy crouched and helped Russ up.
“You okay, man?”
Russ nodded, trying not to show weakness but his neck burned, his stomach was doing flips. Tommy offered to carry him back to the Beetle but he chose to walk by himself.
“And Tommy!” Cayden called out. “Once you have a location. You let me know. I’m going with you to make sure you guys don’t fuck it up again.”
Great. That was all he needed. Now he definitely couldn’t skim off the top. As they backed out and headed for Tommy’s house, Russ began to have his doubts. “Listen, I appreciate what you did back there but there is no way we’ll find that plane. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. And with everything that’s happened, perhaps this is the time to part ways.”
“As much as I wanted to help, I wasn’t lying. I think we can find it. It won’t be easy but… I have a few ideas.”
“Like?”
“The map obviously. I think I can figure out the trajectory. But the other is asking around town, checking in with the medical center. There is a slim chance Dustin survived and if he did maybe he made his way down or was brought in. We can ask.”
Russ brought a hand up to his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose as he drove out of the lot. He could feel a migraine coming on, probably from a lack of sleep over the past two days but it was also stress. He’d seen what Cayden had done to those who screwed him over and although he was his nephew, he knew he wouldn’t give him leniency.
“So basically you don’t know,” Morgan said from the backseat before chuckling. “Great. Looks like you’re screwed, Russ.”
Russ slammed the brakes on and twisted in his seat. “You think I’m the only one that will go down for this if we don’t find that coke?” Morgan stared back dumbfounded. “You can be such a moron at times.” He hit the accelerator and continued on. It didn’t take long to arrive at Tommy’s home. It was an apartment on the west side not fa
r from the medical center. He lived alone, choosing to date women rather than settle down. While him and Morgan didn’t have a future because they lacked an education and only knew a life of crime, Tommy knew shit. That was the best way to put it. He was smart but had chosen to bail after going through a bad relationship with some girl. He said it had done him in, and made it too difficult to concentrate on work.
As they got out and entered his two-story aluminum-sided home, they were greeted by three cats that came bounding towards them. Morgan turned up his nose. “It smells like cat piss in here. Seriously, open a window.”
Tommy took them into a modest kitchen. He kept his place clean but with three cats it was hard to control smell. Tommy quickly emptied out a cat litter tray into a bag and tossed it in the backyard. Then he went into another room and returned with a yellow marker and a map. “Give me a hand clearing off the table,” he said. Russ removed a bowl, a cup and a money tree plant then Tommy laid down the map and smoothed it out.
He couldn’t believe he was serious about this.
“I thought you were joking?” Russ said.
“No. Why would I do that?”
“Uh maybe because Pisgah is over 500,000 acres!”
Tommy waved at him and continued on unfazed. “Okay, here’s where we were,” he said drawing a large yellow circle around Ghost Town in the Sky theme park. He jotted down a few numbers, and what appeared to be an estimate of the height and speed, then he drew an X in a location west. “This was the direction I saw the plane heading in. Now think about it. Dustin was a bush pilot. He was used to setting that thing down in remote locations. He would have tried to bring it down in an area that was open. Now I think he went down around…”
“Hold it right there, Tommy. I think you’re overlooking something important.”
“Which is?”
“The lights went out which means the ground would have looked like the sky, pitch black. There would have been no visual cue to determine where to land, and without instruments to tell him how high he was, he could have gone…” He took the pen from Tommy and circled it around a section of the forest that went from Pensacola to Blowing Rock. “There. He could have gone down anywhere inside of there. Now you understand what I was trying to say,” he said tossing the pen on the table and walking away. As much as he admired his friend’s determination and respected his intelligence, this was a crapshoot, nothing more than a guessing game. It was too difficult to figure out accurately where the plane might have crashed unless they were nearby when it came down. Besides they were distracted by the Boeing that crashed within minutes after the lights went out.
“So what do you want to do?” Tommy said.
Russ turned to him. “I say we get the fuck out of here. Leave Ryerson.”
“This is my home. I’m not leaving,” Morgan said.
“Then you’ll die. Cayden doesn’t give a shit about you, me or anyone but himself. He knows we can’t find it. He’s delaying the inevitable.”
Tommy stepped forward. “Well I say we at least pay the medical center a visit. See if Dustin did make it. That’s if he even made it this far.”
To stick around was absurd but until they knew what was happening in town venturing beyond the town limits would have been equally absurd.
14
The unknown. Sara had never been very good at dealing with it. Landon could handle it, not her. And now her worst fear was getting the better of her. What if the plane Hank saw go down had been them? No, don’t go there, she thought. She shivered in Jake’s 1979 Scout on the way back from Hancock County Bar Harbor Airport in Trenton. He’d offered to take her out there to see if they’d arrived but the airport was closed. It felt like a complete waste of time and gas. She’d apologized three times in the space of half an hour, offering gas money but Jake told her to relax and keep it. The heater was on full blast but with 21 degrees outside, it was doing little to keep them warm. She peered through the frosted windshield; her mind lost. Jake tried to stay positive.
“I’m sure there’s a good reason. Landon might still be in Alabama.”
“No, I got his message on the voice mail. He was on his way back,” she said.
Jake nodded and kept looking ahead. A few times in the trip there and back groups of people had tried to flag them down seeking a ride but Jake wouldn’t slow which seemed odd to her. On the fourth time they passed a group she spoke up. “You know there is room in the back.”
“It’s too dangerous,” he said.
“Why?”
He sucked in a breath and cast a sideways glance at her. “Minimal vehicles are on the road. It makes people like us a target.”
She laughed. “Are you serious?”
“Of course.”
“This is Maine, Jake, not New York City.”
“That’s being a little biased,” he said.
She smirked. “No I’m just saying; people are generally friendly.”
“When things are going well. This is affecting the whole country, Sara. You saw those downed planes, those buildings on fire in Ellsworth. We are dealing with a completely different beast.”
“Okay, I will admit it’s strange but…”
“It’s not strange. It’s an EMP.”
“A what?”
“You’ve never heard of that before?”
“Why would I? I get up early, spend my days catering to guests and by the end of the day I am too damn tired to be browsing online researching EMTs.”
“EMP,” he said correcting her with a chuckle.
She pulled a face. “All right, smart-ass. I’m just saying, I’m lucky if I can get some free time to take a bath.”
“I don’t know, you smell good to me,” he replied in a flirtatious manner.
She slapped him on the arm and went slightly red in the face.
He nodded. “Anyway, sounds like you need to slow down.”
“What, like you?” she asked, casting a glance at him knowing full well he worked all the hours under the sun.
“Touché,” he replied, his mouth cracking into a smile.
She groaned. “Ugh, what’s happened to us? It’s like my entire life revolves around making ends meet. I never envisioned this when I was a kid. Life seemed so much more…” she searched for the words.
“Lighter?” Jake asked.
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Lighter. Carefree. Now it’s all about paying bills, staying ahead of the tax man and arguing.”
“Arguing?”
She realized she’d put her foot in her mouth. “Um…” At one time she and Landon never argued. It was a joy to be around him but over the past few years it seemed like all the fun had been sucked out of the relationship. It felt more like work than something that flowed naturally. They were always butting up against each other, arguing about small, stupid, insignificant things that later she would shake her head at. She loved him — dearly — but with him delivering planes all the time and her focused on the inn she would have been lying to say that they hadn’t grown apart. The ember that once glowed bright and brought them to life had all but fizzled out. When he was home, he wasn’t there. His mind was elsewhere and she expected him to chip in and help around the manor but all he wanted to do was relax, go fishing or sit out in the yard. It was like they were worlds apart. Obviously, she didn’t hound him and maybe it was because she was working all hours of the day and night that she figured he should too. It was hard to separate the business from the home.
Sara quickly changed the subject rather than drag him down into the mire of her shaky marriage. “So this EMP… How could it happen? What is it? And how long does it last?” She peppered him with questions and he did his best to bring her up to speed on what he’d learned from a client who’d brought in an old Jeep.
“Look, I can only relay what I was told by this client. I mean I laughed the first time he told me that he’d bought this banged-up old Jeep in preparation for some apocalyptic event but it got me thinking. I looked into it and the next
thing I knew I snapped up this Scout at an auction for next to nothing. Figured it would sit in my garage gathering dust and I’d never use it. Lo and behold, here we are,” he said. “It seems there’s a lot of confusion in the general public about EMPs, what they are, how they happen and what they affect. I won’t bore you with it.”
“Well I think I should at least know what we’re dealing with.”
He groaned. “Electro-magnetic pulse or EMP for short. Believe me, there are some headcases out there who really get riled up about this stuff as if they have something to prove. But the short explanation is it can come from a nuclear missile detonating or a coronal mass ejection.”
“A what?” She was getting more confused by the minute.
“A solar flare. From the sun. Often called a CME. Again there is a lot of confusion surrounding it, but basically in a nutshell an EMP is broken into three component pulses. An E1 is brief, fast and intense. This is basically why our computers and communication aren’t functioning. It damages the electrical elements. You then have an E2 which tends to occur in lightning strikes, our nation is somewhat prepared to handle that. Then you have an E3 which is slower, similar to a geomagnetic storm that comes from a solar flare. This can damage power lines, transformers and so forth. Basically any critical infrastructure. Some will argue that a CME doesn’t include an E1 or an E2 and so the only things that would be affected would be the power grid, not vehicles or smaller electronics, so they tend to refer to it as a solar EMP and not an EMP by itself. Anyway, if I had to put money on it, my best guess is this is nuclear not a solar event, or… maybe it’s a combination.”
As he rattled on, it just went right over her head. “Yeah, this is probably why I don’t look into this,” Sara said.
He laughed. “Not exactly stuff you listen to as you’re dozing off at night,” he said. “Look, all you need to know is we’re screwed. That’s the bottom line.” He said it in such a nonchalant way.
