Darkness Rising

by Justin Bell

  “Mom, what are you doing? Come on!”

  “I’ll be right behind you!”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” her daughter replied, and Rhonda felt a swift coating of warmth run through her chest at those six words. Somewhere along the way in the last fifteen years, she’d lost contact with her daughter. Lost hold of what had made them a real family unit. It was strange how life and death circumstances can bring families together.

  “You won’t lose me, sweetie, okay? I’ll be right behind you.”

  In the dim light of the moon Rhonda could see her nod softly, yet somewhat uncertainly, then she turned and dashed across the road, joining the rest of the family as they crashed into the trees.

  As soon as Rhonda heard the tree shuffling fade, she locked her fingers in the catch, popping the hatch and looping the strap of the black duffel around her shoulder. It was large and heavy, metal clanking together and shifting the weight, causing her to almost fall over. She recovered, using the vehicle as support, barely keeping herself upright.

  Just halfway there, a car engine rumbled in the close distance, and she saw two beams of light making their way towards her, shining pale splashes on the trees. She slammed the trunk and lumbered across the road towards the trees where her family just disappeared, and plunged headlong into the dark forest.

  ***

  Day one of the worst day in American history was nearly over.

  Agent Brandon Liu looked out the narrow hallway window into the deepening indigo sky, clouds moving in to obscure the scattering of long dead stars. If this escalated, how long would it be before the entire planet was just another one of those dead stars?

  That wasn’t something he wanted to think about. Especially today, on his two-year anniversary with Chunhua. All he had wanted to think about was their future together. Two years down, and it had felt like so many great years still to come.

  He lowered his gaze from the stars to the buildings that surrounded the new FBI office building, which was actually in Chelsea, not Boston proper. Most of the houses within sight were dark or dim, as if the inhabitants were afraid to turn their lights on for fear of attracting another suitcase-nuke-carrying terrorist to their doorstep.

  Pulling away from the window, Liu trudged down the hallway, his combat boots clomping on the smooth tile floor. He still wore his dark blue CBP uniform, though he had removed the tactical vest a couple of hours previously. The smell of coffee permeated the narrow hallway and he angled towards one of the many kitchenettes to seek out a hot cup of black.

  He had just topped off his cup when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned and nodded to Agent Julie Swift who somehow managed to still look pristine and wrinkle-free in spite of being in her tenth straight hour of work at the federal building.

  “We’re briefing in Conference Room C,” she said, nodding down the hall. “Ready?”

  Liu took a long, deep swallow of the warm coffee. “I am now.”

  She turned and walked down the hall with Liu close behind, then veered into the medium-sized conference room. There were a dozen other agents scattered throughout the room in several different folding chairs. Liu recognized ATF agent Reynolds and Rita Kramer from Homeland Security, but most of the rest of the room weren’t familiar to him, and several of them still remained in battle togs as he was. They were tactical. He figured many of them were either FBI or ATF and was at least moderately surprised to be the only customs agent in the room.

  Kramer was at the head of the room, flanked by a large flat screen device sitting dim and mounted on the wall.

  “Good evening,” she said quietly, addressing the crowd. “It’s been a very long day. I extend our thanks and gratitude from the American people for your hard work today. As you can imagine there are hundreds of these very briefings going on across the country right now as we work to consolidate all of our information and get all agencies on the same page.”

  She pressed a remote and the flat screen blinked to life, showing a satellite image of the United States with several red dots scattered about, most of them centralized on or near the West Coast.

  “As you all know by now, at various times this morning there were coordinated attacks against several ports of call, most of which were along the West Coast. These attacks successfully penetrated American borders, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians and crippling critical infrastructure, not just in the West, but across most of the nation.”

  Pressing another button on the remote, the screen faded to an overland view of Utah.

  “What you may not know is that a short time ago, a natural gas power facility in central Utah was struck by a modified nuclear device, even more powerful than the suitcase nukes detonated this morning.”

  Voices murmured throughout the room as they looked at the site of the explosion, far and away the furthest east a successful strike had hit. It was a stark reminder that this was not an isolated incident or an event that had come and gone. Strikes were actively happening, and could possibly be actively happening, for some time still to come.

  “What sized device are we talking about?” Agent Liu asked.

  “Current estimate is fifty kilotons.”

  “You can’t be serious,” whispered Agent Reynolds.

  “We expect news to break on this event shortly, but we’re trying to stay ahead of it as much as humanly possible. FEMA has been notified and we are dispatching operatives from Fort Leavenworth and Fort Carson to begin recovery and evacuation. Already power interruptions are being felt throughout the central United States and the entire country west of the Rocky Mountains has officially gone dark.”

  “Do we have active communications with boots on the ground west of the Rockies?” Agent Swift asked.

  Kramer didn’t reply right away. “We have scattered reports, but connectivity has been…unreliable.”

  “What?” Liu asked. This surprised him. He had been under the impression that they’d been coordinating with rescue and recovery processes throughout the day.

  “Just what I said, Agent Liu. This level of destruction is unlike anything we’ve dealt with before. We’ve had several layers of redundancy that have been systematically failing since the incidents this morning. Each one of these detonations that occurs moves us back and further away from appropriate coordination and communication of rescue procedures.”

  “So how are we resolving this?” Liu asked.

  “I’m open to any suggestions,” she replied.

  The low rumble of murmurs escalated to a fever pitch at this comment as tactically equipped agents throughout the room turned and started speaking to and over each other.

  “Please!” Kramer shouted, lifting a hand. “Please understand that Homeland Security and all government agencies are doing everything we can to restore the chains of communication and re-establish control.”

  “Are we writing off half of the country?” asked Reynolds.

  “We are most certainly not,” Kramer replied. “However, the purpose of this Task Force is not to focus on rescue or recovery. Our sole purpose is to find ways to prevent more of these attacks from occurring.”

  “Seems like a tall order without active communications with half the country,” Liu said.

  “That’s why we recruited the best.”

  The room fell into moderate silence as Kramer crossed her arms in front of the room, looking out over the meeting attendees.

  “If you have suggestions, let’s take them after the briefing. Now, can we get back to business?” She pressed the remote again and the screen shifted from the overhead view of Utah to grainy surveillance footage of a white box truck and a security guard. “Lake Side Power Plant had a cloud-based security system, and their security footage was synchronized to a northeast data center as it was being recorded. We were able to acquire the footage leading up to the detonation of the device in Utah in a brief window when we had a connection.”

  She looked at the screen and advanced the picture frame by frame un
til the driver slipped out of the front door and landed on the pavement. There she froze the screen and zoomed in on the driver. It was an unfocused, static littered image, but the face of the driver could be made out pretty clearly.

  “This is the truck driver and the man we believe was responsible for detonating the device at Lake Side Power Plant. We have not identified him yet, but I’m tasking you with doing the legwork to figure out who this guy is. It’s going to be rough with our communication issues, but we’ve nearly got a link to a redundant system established that should do the job for now. Agents Harris and Mackie, you’re on this, got it?”

  Two of the agents in the room nodded.

  She stood at the front of the room, stoic and pensive, clasping her wrist in front of her and considering her next words carefully.

  “We’re in uncharted territory, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t think you need me to tell you that.”

  The room was silent, in rapt attention.

  “The information I’m about to reveal is classified at the highest levels, but I have been authorized to share it with you all. Our boots on the ground and agents and citizens are laying their lives on the line in defense of our country.”

  Nobody was speaking now. Nobody was looking away. Everyone was completely captivated by what she was saying and what she was showing. Her thumb triggered the remote and the screen shifted to reveal the device that nearly blew up the port of Boston.

  “This is the undetonated device that Agent Liu and his team successfully recovered from the failed infiltration this morning.” She clicked again and the shot zoomed into a quadrant of the metallic superstructure where a series of numbers could be seen embossed on the surface of the containment mechanism.

  “These numbers are present on the metal housing of the device and we believe they represent a tooling designation. It would be a number assigned to a certain product line, and typically they’re produced at the same time as other similarly designed components.”

  Activating a laser pointer, she circled the numbers and continued, “As you can see the number listed here is 978456.”

  A few people in the room scribbled the information down on notepads, but Liu simply sat with his elbows on his knees, watching what she was saying with undivided attention.

  "Before we lost communications completely with the western part of the country, we were sharing some intel from blast sites in San Diego, Sausalito, and Las Vegas. Part of a piece of melted housing was recovered in Las Vegas.”

  The screen flipped again and a distorted hunk of metal was visible in the middle of the screen, twisted and malformed by heat, but surprisingly intact considering what had happened all around it.

  “Like the device recovered in Boston, this containment unit is stamped with a series of numbers that we believe designate the number in production.” The screen flashed and she pointed out the numbers with the laser pointer. “As you can hopefully see, the number here is 978527.”

  The room continued its silence, whether because they were trying to understand the significance, or the revelation had stunned them into silence, Liu wasn’t sure, but the picture was starting to come together, at least for him.

  “If you compare the two numbers, you can see that there are approximately fifty digits separating the two. If these two housings were produced simultaneously, as we believe they were, that would indicate that there are at least fifty of these compressed suitcase nukes in circulation, and only six of them have been detonated.”

  The room erupted into mumbles and voices, conversations going back and forth among the agents sitting in the crowd. There was no more stunned silence, the importance and significance of these numbers was now quite clear.

  “So there are going to be more attacks,” Liu said.

  Rita Kramer regarded him with a serious look, nodding curtly. “I think we all believe that it is inevitable.”

  “If six explosive devices nearly brought this country to its knees, what will fifty do?” Reynolds asked, and judging by the reactions of others in the room, he was speaking what they all were thinking.

  “Let’s all hope we don’t have to find out,” Kramer replied.

  “So what’s our next step?” Liu asked.

  “First priority is identifying the man who exploded the truck in Utah. Second priority is further analysis on bomb debris and see if we can isolate where these housings were constructed and truly how many we can expect out in the wild. Last and certainly not least, we need to re-establish lines of communication with first responders west of the Rocky Mountains and get those people whatever they need to get our citizens to safety. Manpower, resources, shelter, safe passage, and whatever else it takes to try to get this country back to normal.”

  Liu nodded as he knew she expected him to do, but in the back of his head he also knew that from here on out there would be no such thing as normal. At least not the normal they were all familiar with. This was a whole new, whole different kind of normal, and a new normal that would be sticking with them for a very long time.

  “All of you have spent the day working very hard, and you all deserve some time to rest, so you’re all dismissed until 0700 tomorrow. Go home, spend some time with your families, recharge, refresh, and be back tomorrow morning where we can pick up where we left off.”

  All around the room agents in tactical uniforms stood and shook hands, gestured to others, and began dispersing and heading towards the door.

  Agent Liu remained seated, elbows on his thighs, looking at the scuff marks on the polished tile floor.

  “Don’t you have someone to see?” Agent Swift asked, taking the seat next to Liu.

  “I do. My wife,” he replied. “Today was our second anniversary.”

  “Ouch,” Swift replied. “That’s a day you’re not going to want to remember.”

  Liu chuckled.

  Swift placed a hand on his shoulder as she stood. “Go see her, Brandon. There will, unfortunately, be plenty of time for rebuilding and mourning in the months and years to come. Don’t waste your life with only this.”

  Liu nodded as she walked away, then stood and walked towards the screen, where an image of the metal housing was still displayed. He stood for a few moments, looking at it, tucking his elbow in his hand and stroking his chin.

  “See something interesting?”

  Liu turned as Kramer walked in, her high heels echoing against the floor in the silence of the late night building.

  “Maybe,” he replied. “What kind of material is this?” he asked, gesturing towards the housing.

  “Seems to be some kind of reinforced titanium, but we can’t be certain.”

  “How did it survive being at Ground Zero in Las Vegas?”

  Kramer shrugged. “We’re honestly not sure. That’s something we’re hoping to find out.”

  “Something about this doesn’t make sense,” Liu remarked turning away from the screen and walking out into the empty room, placing his hands on his hips. “Too many coincidences. Too many successes.”

  “Not in Boston.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  Kramer narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you thinking, Agent?”

  Liu picked the remote up off the desk where Kramer had set it moments ago, then clicked back through the presentation, halting on the shot of the United States with the bombing sites.

  “Every attack was on or near the West Coast except one. Does that make any sense at all?”

  Kramer shrugged. “Maybe a second wave is incoming?”

  “As disturbing as that thought is, I’m not convinced,” Liu said. “The attacks here were strategic and calculated. I think they were trying to distract us with the Boston bomb, drawing our attention that way, then stacking up on the West Coast.”

  “But why?”

  “Couple of reasons. Higher probability for success, and it’s a slow burn.”

  “A slow burn?”

  “Striking these isolated targets in a region far away from the nor
theast will create a chain reaction that brings the States to its knees. An obvious attack on Washington or New York itself would cause all hell to break loose in the blink of an eye. We’d come together, launch a counter-attack and then staunch the bleeding. Here,” he continued, shining the pointer at Utah, then Las Vegas, then Seattle, “they’re hitting us in our femoral artery instead of going for the throat. It’s lethal, but doesn’t appear to be lethal. Striking the blood flow in our thigh, letting us bleed out nice and slow. We get cut in the throat or the heart, immediately we react, take out the threat, then worry about healing ourselves. Cut us in the leg, though, and maybe we focus on healing first. That slows our reaction time enough that when we finally do react to the threat, it’s too late and they give us a knockout punch that puts us out of commission for good.”

  Kramer stood with her arms crossed, looking at the country and nodding almost imperceptibly.

  She waited a few beats, a few long, silent beats, then turned to him. “Seems a little complex and elaborate for a North Korean show of power, don’t you think?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I do think.”

  She patted him on the back and turned to walk out. “That’s some good analysis, Liu. We get through this, you should think about coming to Washington. We could use a brain like that.”

  He chuckled. "You’ll have to convince my wife.”

  “We’ll have dinner sometime. She’ll be buying your plane tickets before breakfast.”

  Rita Kramer left the room, her footsteps fading down the dimly lit hallway, leaving Agent Liu standing alone, still in body but crowded and active in mind.

  Chapter 5

  Lights bracketed the edge of the woods, pale and white, turning the trees into looming, spindly-limbed aliens standing tall and strong over the Fraser family. Rhonda crouched low among the brush and tall grass with Winnie and Phil right behind her, while Max and Bradly drifted farther back into the recesses of the makeshift forest. Cars rumbled over gravel, shuddering across the uneven terrain, veering right and continuing down the road, seemingly not even noticing the smashed van in the ditch on the opposite side.