The Grid Goes Black (Super Pulse Book 1)

by Dave Conifer

  “What’s that, Nick?” Sarah asked. “I thought we covered everything.”

  “I don’t want to say yet,” Nick answered. “I’m not ready. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. And Chuck, maybe you’ll be ready to talk about guns by then. Who gets what, how to shoot, maybe a patrolling schedule. Whatever you think we need to do.”

  “Good for me,” Chuck said.

  “Same here,” Tom chipped in. “It’s a relief to be part of this group.”

  “Then we’ll get together again tomorrow night. Same time and place,” Nick said.

  Tom was the first to get up to leave. “I have to get going, anyway. I’m walking over to Mike Neimeister’s.” He held up a plastic bag. “Baby clothes. Two month-old little girl, but you know how that is. She’s twice as big as when this all started, but of course they have no way to buy her any new clothes. Too bad we can’t spare any diapers.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Chuck said. “Is it time to wrap this up?”

  Nick laughed. “Okay. Chuck’s right, I think we’re done. Thanks for coming out, everybody.”

  “And rock on,” Dewey added. Nicked looked at him sideways as the rest of them gathered their belongings. Matt promised to discuss the defense plan with his wife. Then they all trudged away in the dark.

  Fourteen

  Lying on his cot, listening to Carlo snoring from across the room, Roethke laughed at himself for getting duped. It had been over a week since Major Hall had sent his gofers out into the parking lot to keep them from leaving. They’d gone back inside, where Hall had enticed them with elaborate tales of meetings and briefings with military “higher-ups.” So far, a week later, none of that had happened. Instead, he, Carlo and Dee had been cooling their heels waiting to be summoned.

  Now, they found themselves cooped up inside this unbearably bland building, which looked at every turn like a monument to taxpayer-funded bureaucracy. Apparently it housed the agency which “managed” the bridge, whatever that meant. A bridge needs a government to run it? Leave it to laymen to overcomplicate things to enhance their own importance and make themselves feel smarter.

  At any rate, it had now been re-purposed as a military sub-station of sorts. At least the food was better than back home, and there was more of it. With nothing else to do, Roethke had carefully watched the comings and goings, and estimated that there were between twenty and thirty soldiers based there.

  It somehow annoyed Roethke that Carlo didn’t seem to mind being stuck there. Aside from making sure none of the weekend warriors messed with the van, and more importantly, the arsenal it housed, he should have been as bored as Roethke. Instead, he walked around the place in his fatigues like a celebrity, shaking hands with everybody he met. He was always sure to let them know that he was a real soldier who’d ducked a lot of bullets in combat. He’d even started taking a daily swim in the bay every afternoon, and his normally dark skin had gone even more bronze as a result. It was as if he was at a Caribbean resort. Carlo was thriving here, and that drove Roethke crazy.

  The night before, however, Major Hall had dropped by personally to invite Roethke to a meeting which was scheduled first thing in the morning. Finally there was going to be some payoff. This was the meeting that had been promised in the parking lot. Joining them to deliver a briefing and answer questions would be a Colonel Stan Quigley, who allegedly knew a lot more about – as far as Roethke gathered – everything that had happened. The excitement and anticipation of that meeting had largely prevented Roethke from getting any sleep, although he might have passed out for an hour or so at some point during the night. Now that it was almost daylight, it was just about time for the meeting. The first step was to get out of bed.

  ~~~

  “Colonel Quigley will be joining us in a teleconference in a few minutes,” Hall told Roethke an hour later, after meeting Roethke in the lobby. Hall’s black shoes, glistening with polish, clicked on the hard floor as the two men walked toward his office. Roethke’s sneakers didn’t make a sound. “He couldn’t be here, so I’ll put him on speaker phone.”

  “You have phones that work?” Roethke asked. “How is that possible?”

  “I told you before,” Hall said. “We’re ahead of the civilians on this. We’ve been hardening our electronics for years. We’ll be on a satellite linkup. There aren’t many birds working right now, so it’s hard to get access to one, but we got lucky today.”

  “So you have phones,” Roethke said. “But not much power. My man spotted the generators on the side of the building. So much for being ahead of us lowly civilians. We have generators, too.”

  “To begin with, this isn’t even our building,” Hall said. “We’re just here to hold the bridge. But you’re right, in general. We don’t have much capacity for generating power, even on our own bases. We rely on the civilian grid for that.”

  “Understood,” Roethke said. “So who is Quigley, and why are we talking to him?”

  “He’s based at Fort Detrick, in Maryland,” Hall explained. “He’s less of a military man, and more of a techie-scientist type. I’ve met him in person. He must be good at what he does, because he doesn’t exactly toe the line. I think it’s safe to say that Quigley is the only colonel in the United States Army that can get away with wearing sandals with his dress greens.”

  “I either love that, or I hate that,” Roethke said. “I’m not sure which. He’s a colonel. So he outranks you, right?”

  “He does. But he’s not the kind of officer who cares too much for the chain of command. They just promote a guy like this every few years to keep him around. He specializes in climate and weather,” Hall said. “I thought he might be able to answer some of your questions.”

  “Good,” Roethke said. “Because I have plenty of them. But tell me this, Major. Why do you care about keeping me informed? What’s in it for the US Army?”

  “I told some supervisors about you,” Hall explained. “They want to stay in touch with your group. It’ll help us understand what’s going on out there beyond what’s left of the government. I told them the best way to keep you close was to feed you information.”

  “True on all fronts,” agreed Roethke.

  “I’m told that he’s developed more information about what happened,” Hall said. “It ought to be interesting.”

  “About the EMP? Or the mysterious navy that’s blockading the coastline?” Roethke asked.

  “The EMP,” Hall answered. “Quigley is big on science and, well, not so big on military. We’ll have to track somebody else down for the military side later. There’s someone from the Pentagon who wants to meet you, anyway. He’ll know all about it.”

  “The Pentagon?” Roethke asked. “I’m not sure what to make of that. I’m just glad to hear that the Pentagon is still standing. I guess.”

  “It’s still, there,” Hall said. “Or so I’m told. Maybe we can arrange that later.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Roethke said. “Fine. I can probably share most of what we’re doing. But I’m looking forward to hearing what Quigley has to say, mostly.”

  ~~~

  Several other officers, all dressed as formally as Hall was, crammed into the office to hear the briefing. Hall had been too busy setting up the satellite link and speaker phone to make introductions, so Roethke and the officers spent those minutes eyeing each other uncomfortably. Finally, after Hall was able to make the technology work, they heard the scratchy voice of Colonel Quigley through the speaker.

  “Morning, everybody. So what can I help you fellows with?” Quigley asked.

  The officers scowled at each other, obviously annoyed with Quigley’s lack of military bearing. Roethke snickered. He was already starting to like this Quigley guy.

  “Good morning, Colonel Quigley,” said a man whose name tag identified him only as ‘Wells.’ “We were told that you could deliver a briefing on what you’ve learned.”

  “Could?” Quigley asked. “Absolutely. Would? I wasn’t planning on making any speeches, not at this ti
me of the morning.”

  “The last I heard,” Wells said, “was that something happened on the sun to wreck the power grid. Is that still what you people are thinking?”

  “Yeah, well, see, that’s exactly what happened, we’re pretty sure,” Quigley said. “We haven’t been able to do much testing, of course. But we combed through all the records that were preserved, and yes, that’s what we think happened.”

  “Can you tell us exactly what it is that happened, Colonel?” Wells asked. “With more detail, perhaps?”

  “Sure can,” Quigley replied. “It all started with a sunspot. Now, we monitor these closely. We have for years. Most of them don’t matter a whit. And the ones that do, well, we can’t do anything about them anyway, so I’m not sure why we bother. Sounds kind of stupid, now that I think of it.”

  “This is Doctor Ted Roethke. I’m a physicist at Penn,” Roethke said toward the speaker phone unit that rested on the desk. “Nice to meet you. So, to ask the obvious – this sunspot was one of the ones that did matter?”

  “It was one of the wildest we’d ever seen,” Quigley said. “We first noticed it in May. We were putting out statements about it all through June, but I doubt anybody noticed. We put out statements every time we tie our shoes. But yeah, this one was bad. It was bad enough that we gave it a name. AR 2252. You know it’s bad when we give it a name.”

  “What was so bad about it?” one of the officers asked. “Is it mostly a matter of size?”

  “That’s part of it,” Quigley said. “These are huge suckers. AR 2252 is a flare of radiation spurting off the sun. A flare that’s fifteen times larger than the earth itself. Of course, size isn’t the only factor. The problem is when it rotates to a position that lines it up with the Earth. Most of the time these X-class flares don’t matter, because their radiation just shoots off into space. But not this time.”

  “X-class flare?” Roethke asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what we call them if they’re strong enough to get named,” Quigley said. “X-class generates an incredible burst of radiation. And when they’re pointed at us, it means trouble. That’s what happened here, we think. A powerful, sustained flare of radiation was aimed right at our planet, and it did everything we were afraid it could do.”

  “Colonel Quigley, you said it was pointed at our planet,” another man asked. “Do you mean to tell me that the entire Earth got fried?”

  “Honestly, we don’t know for sure, my brother,” Quigley said. “We can only extrapolate from what we do know, based on our limited knowledge of how these solar storms work, and of course, how the earth moves through space. Until now, we haven’t had a lot of practical experience.”

  “Sorry, Colonel Quigley,” Roethke said. “Was there an answer somewhere in there? The man asked you how widespread this is.”

  “Chill, Doc,” Quigley said. “That was you, right?” It sounded to Roethke like he was laughing. “The answers aren’t always simple, okay? Now, here’s my best effort. We first noticed AR 2252 in late May. It was actually a European observatory that saw it first.”

  “You knew about this since May?” one officer asked. “And you just sat on it?”

  “We didn’t sit on it,” Quigley said. “We did what governments do best. We issued a series of worthless warnings and bulletins for the public to ignore. I think I already mentioned that we’re completely powerless to do anything more useful than that. What would you suggest we should have done? Order the sun to behave itself?”

  “Please go on, Colonel,” Hall said.

  “Thank you. So, anyway, we tracked it starting in May, and it looked like it would miss us. But on June thirtieth it spun in a way that we didn’t expect. By July sixth, the last records we have because that’s the morning we got fried, it was aligned in a really bad way for us. That’s where the extrapolation comes in. We think the flares sustained themselves at peak radiation for several hours. The western hemisphere took a huge hit. I don’t need to tell you that. Both North and South America took direct and prolonged blasts of solar radiation.”

  “What about the rest of the world?” Roethke asked.

  “We think,” Quigley said, “and again, this only extrapolation and conjecture, but we think Europe and a good part of Asia rotated right into the teeth of this thing a few hours after we got zapped. The flare probably started a slow fizzle by then. We’ve never seen a flare sustain at peak strength for much longer than this one apparently did. So that makes my projection a worst-case scenario. But sadly, we’ve seen nothing since then to indicate that I’m wrong.”

  “So you’re saying that North and South America got blasted, then Europe, and then part of Asia,” one man said. “How about Africa?”

  “We think Northern Africa would likely have taken a big hit,” Roethke said. “Sub-Sahara, we’re not sure. The same goes for the lower parts of South America, actually. We don’t have enough experience with this to know how the tilt of the axis plays into this.”

  “What about Asia?”

  “Unless the flares held their alignment for a longer period of time than any flare we’ve ever tracked, Eastern Asia would have suffered significantly less damage,” Quigley said. “That’s as far as we can go. We simply don’t know.”

  “Australia?”

  “If anybody got through this unscathed, it was probably them.”

  “Isn’t it possible to generate a man-made EMP?” an officer asked. “I know it is, as a matter fact. We’ve looked into it, and we know our enemies have looked into it. Just so we’re putting everything on the table here, do we know for certain that the sun caused this?”

  “We know it to the point that we could possibly know anything under the circumstances,” Quigley said. “I feel quite confident that this was caused by activity on the surface of the sun.”

  “It just seems strange that nothing like this has ever happened before,” the officer persisted. “This is the worst natural disaster we’ve ever seen. Why now, for the first time in the history of the world? We’ve been orbiting the sun all this time and now this happens out of the blue?”

  “This is a million-year event, as far as I’m concerned,” Quigley said. “It’s not that often that a solar storm of this magnitude flares up to begin with. Then, take into consideration the odds that it will align in a way to have any effect on this tiny little dot called Earth that’s ninety-three million miles away. You wouldn’t expect all these events to coincide very often, and they don’t.”

  “But still,” the questioner persisted, “How can you be so sure that this wasn’t man-made? Why hasn’t it happened before?”

  “Who says it hasn’t?” Quigley replied. “Keep in mind that it’s only been the past century, roughly, that we had enough technology to get wrecked by a sunspot in the first place. Before that, it could have happened as many times as you can imagine, but nobody even noticed.”

  The meeting spiraled downhill quickly from that point. For some reason that Roethke couldn’t fathom, except maybe that they had some new equipment they wanted to try out, the military minds in the room wanted badly to believe that the EMP was an act of war by other humans. Quigley didn’t give in, arguing that science had already told them how it occurred, and that no military force in the world had the capability to pull off an EMP as devastating as this one. Roethke was glad when the meeting broke up. An hour later, after taking a satellite phone from Major Hall so they could stay in touch, he and his team climbed back into the van and left.

  Fifteen

  Nick was half-awake, with one hand already reaching for the rifle underneath the couch, when he realized that the hand shaking him by the shoulder belonged to Sarah. It was still dark, which didn’t surprise him because it had been weeks since he’d gotten up any later than sunrise. Releasing his grip on the rifle, he spoke. “Sarah?”

  “Nick,” she whispered. “Sorry. I need some help.”

  “What happened?” Nick asked as he sat up. “Is it your arm?” he asked, remembering her encou
nter with the family of looters a few weeks earlier. Whatever it was, he was relieved that she’d come to him. Ever since the argument at the supermarket she’d been keeping her distance.

  He felt her flop onto the couch beside him. “Do you have any antibiotics?” she whispered. “I have a UTI.”

  “A what?”

  “Urinary tract infection,” she said. “It felt funny yesterday when I had to pee. I was hoping it was my imagination. But it was a little worse at bedtime, and now it’s like a fire. It’s definitely not in my head. It’s burning real bad.” Nick felt her hand close around his wrist.

  “I might have something,” Nick whispered back. “Anything like that would be in the bathroom where you girls are staying. Do you have a flashlight?”

  “I have a candle,” she said. “But I already searched that bathroom.” The disappointment was evident in her voice. Or was it fear? “You had some painkillers. That was about it.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Nick said. “I nearly slid off a roof last winter, and twisted my back up real good.”

  “I get these infections a lot,” Sarah said. “Usually I just have to call my doctor, and she calls in a prescription without even seeing me. I probably have ten bottles of meds at home.”

  “What’s going on?” Dewey asked in a raspy voice from across the room. “Who’s there?”

  “Sarah needs antibiotics,” Nick answered. “She’s got an infection.”

  “Like, join the club,” Dewey said. “I think the blisters on my thumbs are infected, too. It’s so hard keeping anything clean. I could use some drugs, too. It doesn’t help that I’m lying here in a pool of my own sweat.”