Trackers: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Thriller

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  Colton’s arms burned as he carried Melissa over the slick terrain. Dead bodies were always heavier than live ones. He’d learned that the hard way in Afghanistan. Since returning from his last tour, he’d managed the anger just like the doc had told him to. Counting to ten, meditating, even getting in a goddamn downward-facing dog position. He’d already tried the first of the two, but nothing was working. And he wasn’t about to do yoga on the trail, not in the rain and definitely not in the company of Raven Spears.

  “You sure you don’t want me to carry her?” Raven asked.

  “No, I’m fine. I told you to watch my damn back.”

  A drop of rain plummeted into Colton’s eye. He paused to wipe it away and stare at the fires in the distance, his mind racing with possible scenarios, each one worse than the last.

  What he did know was those flames wouldn’t be going out anytime soon. Jet fuel was extremely flammable. When Osama bin Laden couldn’t launch missiles at America’s infrastructure, he had picked the next best thing—jumbo planes full of jet fuel.

  “Chief, do you have any idea what happened to those F-16s?” Raven asked. He stood at the side of the trail, crossbow draped across his chest, and his mud-caked Seattle Mariners baseball cap tilted back so he could look at Colton. Creek sat on his hind legs, fur soaked and matted.

  “Enough with the questions,” Colton said. “You’ll tell our chase exactly where we are.”

  “He’s long gone, and if he wanted us dead he would have killed us back in that meadow when he had the drop on us. Now why don’t you let me carry the girl for a while?”

  “I said I’m fine,” Colton said, glaring at Raven.

  Raven muttered something that sounded a lot like “hard-ass” and turned away, clearly not believing his lie. Colton wasn’t fine at all. Melissa was dead, there was a killer on the loose, and with the radio down, he had no way to contact his officers to see what was going on in Estes Park. Something had happened to those jets at the same moment his radio went dead. It might be a coincidence, or it might be a pattern. Until they reached civilization, there was no way to know for sure and no point in talking to Raven about theories.

  The trio continued down the path, rain pattering off their clothing, questions swirling through Colton’s mind. He was doing his best to keep it together, but it was hard not to think the worst. It didn’t help that he could feel Raven’s eyes on him.

  “What?” Colton asked. “You got something else to say?”

  “Nope,” Raven said.

  Colton hoisted Melissa’s body up against his chest. Pain lanced up his arm and neck. He gritted his teeth and pushed on. The military had taught him how to manage pain. Now if he could just learn to manage his anger the same way…

  “Want me to carry her for a while now?”

  “Goddammit, Raven, I told you to watch our backs.”

  Raven stopped mid-stride and straightened his baseball hat. “You trusted me enough to help you look for her, but you don’t trust when I tell you we’re the only two people on this mountain right now?”

  “You’re right, I don’t trust you,” Colton said.

  Raven halted and pursed his lips like he wanted to say something else, but he didn’t reply.

  Colton continued down the trail, leaving him behind. The veins in his muscular forearms bulged as he tightened his grip on the dead girl. How was he going to tell Risa that her little friend would never be coming over for another playdate or a sleepover?

  The wind whistled through the treetops, and pine needles cartwheeled to the ground. Something trickled down Colton’s face. It had been a long time since he shed a tear, but he was too busy staring through the canopy of trees to wipe it away. Overhead, a single rogue cloud rolled across the horizon, leaving behind a jeweled sky. He stepped carefully over a downed branch but kept his gaze on the cloud.

  “You’re not even going to tell me a theory about what happened to those jets?” Raven asked. When Colton only grunted in response, he continued, “I have a few. My people, the Sioux and the Cherokee, have many stories about the end of the world.”

  Colton wanted to snap but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Raven wasn’t going to shut his mouth.

  “End of the world?” Colton asked. “See, that’s the type of path I don’t want to go down right now.”

  Raven pressed on. “Some stories say that the Star People, our ancestors, will return. The signs will be clear. Flooding, fire, earthquakes…”

  “Christians have been saying the same thing for millennia.”

  Raven tipped the bill of his hat toward a towering ponderosa silhouetted in the moonlight. “I’d say the signs are pretty clear, Chief. That flood a few years back, and now the fires from these jets. I’m just saying.”

  “Raven, you’re really starting to piss me off. Whatever happened has nothing to do with your Sky People, or Jesus, or whatever.” Colton lifted Melissa’s body up higher. “A man did this.”

  The words finally seemed to silence Raven. He whistled for his dog and hurried along the trail. As they walked, Colton kept his gaze on the dazzling sky. Out here it was vast and serene, undisturbed by the glow of human engineering. When he was a kid, while his friends had been watching TV, he had been lying with his back to his parents’ deck, studying the stars. Centuries ago, Raven’s ancestors would have done the same thing.

  The sky was their TV.

  But something seemed off about the sky tonight—something was missing. “Raven, hold up.”

  He stopped and followed Colton’s gaze upward. “You see another plane or something, Chief?”

  Colton scrutinized the sky for several seconds. The weight of Melissa’s body was making his arms tremble, but he hardly noticed anymore.

  “No,” Colton finally replied. “That’s just it. I don’t see any aircraft at all.”

  The scent of charred flesh lingered in Brown Feather’s nose as he waited near the house where his woman lived. He had brought her a present from his kill, a warning. Anger rose like a tide through his gut as he waited, but he pushed it back down. He’d waited years to see her again and tracked her across state lines. No matter where she tried to hide, he would find her. They were meant to be together. She had promised.

  He couldn’t wait much longer.

  With his truck not working, he’d had to abandon his original plan, which was to throw her in the back and drive until he found a place where they could be alone. She was supposed to be happy to see him. She was supposed to have waited for him. Instead, she had proven herself to be a faithless liar.

  She was going to pay for her deceit.

  On the day his long hunt for her had finally ended, when he’d tracked her down to this shithole in the middle of nowhere, he’d seen she had started a family with another man. The little girl was a display of her betrayal in the flesh.

  The demons had always said she would betray him, but he hadn’t wanted to believe them. They had been right. They were always right. He understood that now.

  After so many years with only the demons for company, he should have learned to trust them. They were wise, but they were also merciless. He needed to learn to be more like them. They were strong and fast, and they did not waste time waiting for what they wanted.

  No, they simply took it.

  The girl he killed had been a spur of the moment decision. After he had realized the depth of his woman’s betrayal, he’d driven back up the mountain with rage in his heart. Then he’d seen her, another dark-haired girl dressed all in pink and white, skipping away from the bus stop like a lost rabbit kit. He’d lured her into the truck and taken her into the woods with him, thinking that maybe if he had a daughter of his own, his woman would see what a good father he was and return to him.

  That had been a foolish thought. He could see that now.

  Instead of being grateful to be chosen, the little brat had kicked and bit him—as if any of this was his fault—and screamed and screamed until he had finally cut her throat. It had taken
her less than ninety seconds to bleed out, and as he watched her feebly kicking like a toad with its legs broken, he had decided that there was only one way this could end. He had begun building up the campfire with extra logs until the flames were nearly as tall as a man.

  The demons did not waste time, and they did not waste meat.

  When the time had come, he hadn’t tasted her after all. He wasn’t worthy yet to call himself a Water Cannibal. But he would be soon.

  Still half asleep, Senator Charlize Montgomery scanned a dark room and tried to remember where she was. Reality fought with her nightmares for control. Something had woken her, a strange sound that wasn’t part of her dream.

  It was an odd thing, knowing when you’re sleeping but not being able to wake. This sensation wasn’t new to her; the nightmare was a reoccurring memory of the worst day of her life. The pain from losing Richard, and the constant struggle of raising a child, had had a long-lasting effect on her mind and body.

  She felt like she should have been able to handle the stress. Before her career in politics, Charlize was one of the first female pilots to fly combat missions from the cockpit of an F-15 Strike Eagle over Afghanistan. She had been feared in the air and feared on the campaign trail when she had unseated an incumbent Senator in Colorado.

  But Charlize was no longer that woman. She felt broken, and sometimes she wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold the pieces together.

  She pulled the covers up to her chin, shivering as if she could still feel the freezing wind of that day in Denver when she’d gotten the call about the car wreck that killed her husband Richard and paralyzed her son Ty. The next breath was cold enough to sting her lungs. The room was cold. Too cold.

  Sitting up, she rubbed her eyes and scanned the bedroom of her D.C. apartment, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill.

  Usually, she would be able to hear the sporadic honking of cars and the blare of emergency sirens, no matter how late or early the nightmare woke her. Tonight, there was only silence.

  Something was wrong.

  The bedside alarm clock was dark. She grabbed the remote and pointed it at the TV to check the news, but nothing happened.

  She plucked her cell phone from the nightstand and clicked the home button. The screen was blank.

  She tried a second time.

  Nothing.

  The building must have lost power, and her phone, which had been nearly dead when she went to bed, had died on the charger. She crossed the room to the window and pulled back the curtain. Rain slid down the glass. Past the blur of water, she gazed out over the nation’s capital.

  The city was shrouded in darkness.

  She flinched at a rap on her apartment door, but she didn’t turn away from the view. Four stories below, she could see the silhouettes of cars on the street. None of the vehicles were moving. It was if they had all just run out of gas.

  An arc of lightning webbed across the skyline, providing a momentary glimpse of the city. The outlines of the US Capitol, the White House, and the National Mall emerged for a single moment before the light receded.

  She focused on the flickering glow of what could have been a fire. It was miles away, far enough that she couldn’t see what had caused it.

  Another knock sounded on the apartment door, harder this time.

  “Hold on,” Charlize said as she threw on slacks and a t-shirt.

  She opened the door to see the trusted face of her chief of staff, Clint Johnson. The forty-five-year-old staffer was drenched to the bone. He was panting and his hair was mussed.

  “Why are you out of breath?” Charlize stepped to the side and gestured for Clint to come in.

  “I ran here,” Clint gasped. He took in another long breath and added, “From the Capitol.”

  “Sit down and get a hold of yourself,” Charlize said. “Tell me why you’re here.”

  Clint nodded and pulled off his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. Then he took a seat at the dining room table. “Ma’am, there’s a situation.”

  Charlize looked back at the bedroom window. “Some sort of wide-scale power failure?”

  “Not exactly,” Clint said. He allowed himself another breath and scratched at his perpetual five o’clock shadow like he was trying to buy himself time to find the right words.

  Her mind was racing like it did back in the days when she flew an F-15 into battle. “Clint, tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “I got a call from General Lexton a couple hours ago. He tried calling you first, but you didn’t pick up.”

  “My phone’s dead,” Charlize said. Brett Lexton was an old friend now serving as Chief of Staff of the Air Force. They went back twenty years, but this was the first time he had ever called her at night. “I’m supposed to meet with him tomorrow at the Pentagon.”

  “This wasn’t about your meeting, Charlize. He had new intel on the situation on the Korean Peninsula.”

  Charlize narrowed her green eyes. The last time Clint had called her by her first name was four years ago, the night of the wreck that changed her life.

  “What kind of intel?”

  “He wouldn’t say; he just told me to tell you to call him. Could the power outage be from an attack on the grid?”

  She moved into the other room to look out the window again. The tensions were at an all-time high between the United States and North Korea. They couldn’t prove the Americans had been behind the raid that had saved Senator Sarcone’s granddaughter eighteen months prior, but between that and President Drake’s aggressive maneuvers with the Navy, the North Koreans had been on edge. Other than the usual saber rattling, however, they hadn’t threatened any specific actions against America.

  “It’s crazy down there,” Clint said. “Every car I saw is dead.”

  As she watched, a police officer approached one of the growing groups with his hands raised in a placating gesture. She guessed the mob was bombarding him with questions.

  Clint continued talking, but Charlize wasn’t listening. Her eyes were locked on the faint glow to the north. As she scanned the horizon, she saw more fires burning at the outskirts of the city.

  Something terrible had happened out there tonight. As her mind reeled, she clung to one urgent thought: I have to get to my son.

  “Is your phone working? Ty is at the Easterseals camp in Empire, Colorado. I need to make sure he is safe.”

  “I don’t have a signal,” Clint said, holding up his phone. He slipped it back in his pocket. “I’ll find someone that does and have Ty picked up.”

  “How, if the power and phones are out?”

  “They can’t be out everywhere, right?”

  Charlize shook her head, uncertain. “The Capitol and the White House will have backup power.”

  A horrible suspicion entered her mind as she studied the darkened city. In the wake of Nine-Eleven, the government and the military had begun toughening their defenses and planning for every possible type of terrorist attack. She’d been briefed about the possibility of a coordinated electromagnetic pulse attack. The United States was far more vulnerable than the average citizen realized, and it wouldn’t take much to completely disrupt life in the country. Such an attack could knock out the power grid, disable all electronic devices, and even cause planes to fall from the sky.

  “So what do we do, ma’am?” Clint asked.

  Half of Charlize’s focus was in Colorado. Nathan was probably already in Empire. He would look after Ty. But what if he hadn’t made it there? If he’d been recalled to duty, and if the power outage was the result of an EMP, then…no, she couldn’t even think about that. After everything she’d been through, she couldn’t lose her little brother, too.

  She pivoted from the window to face her chief of staff.

  “What do we do? We prepare, Clint. We prepare and head to the Capitol.”

  She stalked to her closet, recalling something she had learned when she flew missions over Afghanistan. Watching the government crumble there had ta
ught her that when the infrastructure of a country collapsed, it didn’t take long for civilized society to break down. If the grid was down from an EMP attack, it wouldn’t take long for chaos to reign over the United States.

  Opening her closet, she bent down and reached for the lockbox at the bottom.

  “Go get my car keys from the kitchen table,” she said. He returned a minute later and handed her the key ring.

  Charlize inserted the smallest key into the lockbox to reveal her M9 and four extra magazines.

  “Ma’am, with all due respect….”

  Charlize silenced him by palming one of the magazines into the pistol with a click. She tucked it into her waistband. Then she put the other magazines into her bugout bag and threw it over her shoulder.

  “Do you trust me?” she asked.

  There wasn’t a single second of hesitation in his voice. “Yes, Senator.”

  “Good, because I have a feeling that whatever happened may have just changed the world.”

  -5-

  “What do you mean the country has been attacked?” Sandra asked the wounded pilot.

  “I can’t tell you anything more than that because I simply don’t know.” Nathan limped down the dirt path, leaning on a stick he’d found.

  “So you can tell me we’ve been attacked, but not by who, or why, or…”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m a pilot, not a politician, but you’ve heard the news. I’m sure we can both guess who was behind this.”

  “North Korea?”

  Nathan didn’t reply. He was moving at a good clip, faster than Sandra could comfortably walk. She increased her pace to a jog.

  “Listen, I’m not going to tell anyone,” Sandra said. “But I have a daughter in Loveland. If she’s in danger, I deserve to know what’s going on.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am—”

  “Stop calling me that. My name is Sandra Spears, and I am not an old lady.”