Black Autumn

by Jeff Kirkham

  Jeff broke her gaze and looked at the wall. A picture of their three boys stared back at him.

  “Tara,” he tried again, “there’s only one thing in this world that will keep me from protecting your family.”

  Tara followed his gaze and her eyes softened.

  “Jeff, you can protect them all,” she argued, her voice reaching out.

  He shook his head, still looking at the photo of the boys. They had been playing in the leaves that day, burying their little brother. Jeff took a wallet-sized version of that picture with him to Afghanistan, Haiti and Iraq, always stowing it in the radio pocket of his plate carrier vest. If he were mortally wounded in combat, he figured it would be even odds that he could get to the photo and look at his boys one last time before dying.

  “I wish I had time to explain to you how that cabin could turn into a deathtrap. You’re going to have to trust me on this, Tara. I know how command works and I know it’ll be days, if not weeks, before your dad and brothers start trusting that I know what the fuck I’m doing. I’ve never been your dad’s favorite person and your brothers feel about the same. They’re not going to take orders from me until things get really, really bad. By then, I might already have lost one of you…” Jeff choked on the words and he mashed down his emotion.

  Tara took a step toward him and Jeff looked down.

  “Tara, I don’t think this will end well. I think you should call your parents right now and tell them to go to the Ross place. Your parents’ cabin won’t fit my team and I’m pretty sure it’s going to take a team to survive this―a team of commandos and a lot of food and water. That’s impossible in your parents’ three-bedroom cabin.”

  Tara reached out and put her hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “What team, Jeff?”

  “Evan and the guys. We need them and they need us.”

  “Okay, but we hardly even know Ross. Why would we trust them over my family?”

  Jeff put his hand on Tara’s. “We don’t know Ross, but it won’t matter once my team gets to his place. Ross won’t be an issue. I’m not going to let anyone do anything to jeopardize my family. You should call your parents right now. I’m not sure how much longer cell phones are going to work.”

  4

  [Collapse Plus Three - Friday, Sept. 22nd]

  Shortwave Radio 7150kHz 2:30am

  “WELCOME TO THE APOCALYPSE, GOOD people of Planet Shortwave. This is JT Taylor, Alcoholic of the Apocalypse, fellow Drinkin’ Bro at your service, broadcasting from a SINCGARS Humvee that I borrowed from Fort Bliss. A hearty shout-out to the Army Electronic Warfare team trying to cruise-missile my ass.

  “We’re hearing from Drinkin’ Bros in the military all over the globe, violating the shit out of the chain of command, bouncing little signals off the ionosphere down to my earholes all night long. Thank you for the news not fit to broadcast. And here it is, friends, the real deal from the horse’s mouth:

  “So…a nuke went off in Los Angeles Harbor. You heard it here first, folks. I am the first broadcaster to admit the obvious: Martians are attacking America. It really is Independence Day and we really are being attacked by Martians. Will Smith is in the air, in his F-18, right now... Give ’em hell, Will. The trick is to fly right up their main weapon butthole when they’re about to shoot it.

  “All the xanaxed-out Hollywood types in Los Angeles have gone batshit crazy because of a teensy bit of nuclear fallout and they’re burning down all the Neiman Marcus and Prada stores as we speak. The Los Angeles inferno is lighting up the night sky all the way out to Barstow…”

  Federal Heights

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  Jimmy McGavin woke up in a fugue state.

  “What?” He sat bolt upright, profoundly disturbed by something. Maybe a nightmare?

  He could hear his neighbors talking outside his bedroom window. It sounded like a normal conversation, but it alarmed him on several levels.

  First, his alarm clock hadn’t gone off and, as he glared at it accusingly, he could see it wasn’t lit.

  Second, his neighbors never talked like this. Sure, they would talk at church, and Federal Heights was as friendly a neighborhood as one could find in America. The friendliness had a lot to do with the fact that ninety percent of the residents belonged to the same Mormon “ward.”

  The LDS Church, or Mormon Church, permeated every aspect of Utah culture and, arguably, had resulted in Utah remaining a promised land, at least for believers. Living in Utah, especially in Federal Heights, was like living in the 1950s set of Leave It To Beaver. The wholesomeness didn’t only benefit Mormons. Everyone living in Utah enjoyed the friendliness and safety the Mormon Church brought. In most parts of Salt Lake City, kids still trick or treated door to door on Halloween. Few metropolitan areas in the U.S. could say the same.

  Even so, neighbors didn’t stand around chatting on their lawns, especially not at 7:00 a.m. on a weekday—or whatever time it was. They should have been heading to work.

  Then he remembered. Things in the world weren’t right. Someone had exploded a nuke off the coast of California. Another bomb had been detonated two days earlier in Saudi Arabia—the first nuclear weapons to be fired in anger since World War II. The stock market had been halted by the SEC, and Los Angeles had descended into a war zone with mass evacuation and raging civil disorder.

  For the life of him, Jimmy couldn’t figure out how the attacks were connected. He could not see the connection between the Saudi bomb, the stock market halt and the California bomb. Why would two nuclear attacks take place within two days of one another half a world away? It made absolutely no sense.

  News out of California yesterday had been a horror show. For policy reasons, the state and federal government were being slow with information, but every post hitting Facebook had been worse than the last.

  The afternoon before, an internet blogger had captured video of a dead baby strapped in her car seat, sitting in the bushes alongside Interstate 15 while cars passed by at a crawl. While nobody knew why the baby had died, the Facebooker implied that the child had perished from radiation poisoning. Mainstream media ran jaded reports claiming that the story about the radiation-dead child might be Russian-sponsored fake news, but the TV stories only succeeded in driving more people to watch the footage of the dead baby. True or not, each view and share cartwheeled southern California into greater chaos.

  According to CNN, the Los Angeles Police Department had detected a radiation signature off Alameda Harbor ten minutes before detonation. Thankfully, the bomb had gone off three miles out to sea, and less than a hundred people had been killed by the nuke itself. The dead had been boaters, the police helicopter crew, a Coast Guard patrol boat crew, and several dozen Los Angelinos who had crashed their cars because of the blinding flash. Direct damage to Los Angeles wasn’t catastrophic; it was more typical of a large earthquake than a nuclear weapon. Thousands of windows had been shattered and hundreds of people had minor injuries from flying glass.

  None of that explained why the southern half of California had come completely unhinged. Nobody could say for sure how much radiation risk Los Angeles faced. Millions of tons of mud and water, possibly radioactive, had been torn from the bottom of the ocean and misted over greater Los Angeles, most of the moisture wafting along in the atmosphere.

  Despite the minor damage, the coastal region from Santa Barbara down to San Diego had become the sixth circle of hell. Millions of people were trying to claw their way out of California just to get anywhere else.

  Waking up to an avocado pit of fear in his stomach felt like the morning after Jimmy’s dad died three years ago. The next day, Jimmy awakened in pretty good spirits, only to remember that his life would never be the same. His dad had died. A dark cloud had overtaken him. He had been forced, secretly, to see a therapist, but he had quit going after a couple of sessions. Digging into his feelings was making it hard for him at work, and there had been an unspoken possibility that he might actually choose to leave his wife if he ke
pt doing the therapy.

  Nothing, not even his life, was worth losing his family. He was definitely a true believer in the Mormon faith and, as a Mormon, one’s personal well-being took a back seat to one’s family. So Jimmy swallowed it all down and eventually worked his way out of the funk through prayer and scripture study.

  Jimmy couldn’t tell what the neighbors were saying outside his bedroom window, but he could hear the occasional laugh, incongruous considering what had happened in the world.

  Jimmy got out of bed, careful not to disturb his wife, and approached his closet. He might still go into work, but for now he grabbed his track suit. He and the track suit shared a love/hate relationship. He knew it made him look fat. Every time he put it on, he felt a dose of self-loathing, hating his body and hating his inability to control his weight. But the track suit was definitely comfortable, and he relished not feeling a leather belt cutting into his gut.

  Jimmy pulled on his running shoes and slipped out the front door, careful not to slam it behind him. The neighborhood guys stood in his next-door neighbor’s side yard, surrounding a small red generator.

  “Ah, darn. Did we wake you, Jim?” Ron Marsdon asked.

  “Nope. I was already up,” Jimmy lied as he walked over to join the group.

  “We were just wondering what time was too early to fire up the genny. Power’s out at your place, too, right?”

  Jimmy stabbed his hands into his track suit pockets and joined the circle. “Sure is. Has anyone heard what caused the power outage?”

  “Tom called the power company on his cell phone, and the recording said there were ‘widespread brown-outs in the Salt Lake Valley.’”

  “Tom’s cell phone worked?”

  “Yeah, so there must be some power somewhere. They’ll get it going again. If not, I’ll bet the Church lights some fires under some butts!”

  Federal Heights was only about ten blocks from the headquarters of the Mormon Church, and Church headquarters probably wasn’t getting power from the grid, either.

  Another neighbor, who Jimmy only knew as Brother Buchanan, chimed in. “The Brethren will get it handled. Or… maybe it’s the Second Coming.”

  The guys all chuckled, finding it only partly humorous. For more than a hundred and seventy years, the Mormon Church had been predicting the end of the world. In the seventies and eighties, the leaders of the Church, “the Brethren,” had counseled members to store a year’s supply of food, to set aside drinking water and to grow a garden. “The end was near,” the Brethren had said.

  But, after decades of the world not ending, the prophetic warning tapered off. These days, the Mormon Church made a concerted effort to sound more mainstream, and talking about the end of the world from the pulpit was definitely not mainstream.

  Still, when a prophet speaks in the Mormon faith, his words are immutable and eternal. Even though Church leaders weren’t talking doom and gloom as much anymore, the old prophecies about the fall of the United States were definitely on the minds of the four men standing around the generator.

  Jimmy’s next-door neighbor Thad said, “Well, at least we all have our gardens and food storage.” The guys laughed to be polite. Thad worked as some kind of lawyer, and he regularly made off-color comments in Gospel Doctrine class on Sunday. He was one of those guys who didn’t seem to know when he was saying something that rubbed people wrong.

  Disobedience was nothing to joke about. Even ignoring “stale” commandments, like the commandment to have a year’s supply of food and to plant a garden, wouldn’t be taken lightly by a faithful Mormon. Every man in the circle knew that none of them had gardens, and they could also guess that nobody had a proper year’s supply of food, either.

  Last year, on the deer hunt, Jimmy’s brother talked a lot about the Church and food storage. He had been asked to volunteer as the Ward Emergency Preparedness Coordinator, and part of that job was to inventory the food storage of ward members. At the end of his survey, he had discovered that less than ten percent of ward members had a year’s supply of food, and less than twenty-five percent had a three-month’s supply.

  The Church, as an institution, had been backing away from preparedness, too, Jimmy’s brother confided. Most of their food storage centers east of the Mississippi were being shuttered, and the amount of food at the Bishop’s Storehouse had been dialed way back. The big grain silos, owned by the Church in Salt Lake and Ogden, sat largely empty.

  If his brother was correct about the Church dialing back, it gave Jimmy some peace. If the Brethren had backed away from emergency preparedness, then it probably meant the Apocalypse and the Second Coming were still a long way off. The leaders of the Church were prophets, after all.

  Jimmy thought about his own woefully insufficient food storage. They had only what his wife had set aside in canned food and Jimmy suspected it was precious little. He looked at his watch and did a quick calculation.

  The Costco in Salt Lake City had already opened, since it typically opened at 7:00 a.m.. The only reason Jimmy knew this was because he had volunteered to buy a birthday cake a couple of times at the office and he had hit the Costco on his way to work.

  Right then and there, Jimmy decided to skip work and head to Costco. This would be the day he would buy his year’s supply. He tried running the numbers on what it would cost compared to the limit on his American Express card, and he kept coming up against numbers that he simply did not know.

  How many cans of food would his family eat in a year? What did a can of food even cost? How much toilet paper did his family use?

  He would have to ask his wife. The thought of asking his wife stopped him in his tracks. She would reply with a million questions, challenge his decision, and then try to get him to do something that she wanted done. To heck with that.

  Jimmy looked at his watch again. “Sorry, boys, I’ve got some stuff to do.”

  “No work today?” Thad asked.

  “Don’t think so. Without the computers running, I don’t see how I can get anything done.” Jimmy thought briefly of the real estate closing, knowing it would be postponed. “See you later, fellas.”

  With Jimmy heading toward his wife’s big SUV, the guys returned to staring at the generator.

  When Jimmy pulled onto Hartwell Avenue, the last turn to Costco, he uttered a rare expletive.

  “What the freak!?”

  Cars were parked up one side of the street and down the other. People were even parking on 300 West and walking two blocks to get to the store.

  Jimmy parked on the little road behind Home Depot and made his way to the Costco parking lot on foot.

  He had never seen anything like it. There were probably three thousand people, all standing in front of the store. The tide of people wasn’t moving. Someone at the front was shouting and the crowd began shushing one another, trying to hear what was being said.

  An invisible person at the front of the massive crowd, presumably a store manager, shouted at the top of his lungs, “I’m sorry, folks. We’re closed…”

  The crowd’s reaction sounded like a combination of a wave hitting the beach and a bear growling. The shushing began again and the noise dropped.

  “We can’t run our credit card machines and we don’t have lights.” The emotion of the crowd again rose up, drowning out the manager. The shushing, mingled with the buzz of angry voices, restored silence.

  “Please come back a little later today…” Then the angry roar overwhelmed all meaningful communication.

  As Jimmy made his way back to his wife’s SUV, the faces around him triggered a primal sense of foreboding in his gut. He had never seen people this freaked out. He actually feared a little for his own safety, even in broad daylight. He hurried back to the Suburban but got distracted by his cell phone buzzing.

  It was a text from his wife. “Where is my car? I have to take Taylor to school and her backpack is in the SUV. Why’d you take my car without asking?”

  The bile in Jimmy’s stomach turn
ed. He said a silent prayer and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  • • •

  Fulton Residence

  Sacramento, California

  Robbie Fulton had been enjoying a rare interlude at home in Sacramento when California imploded.

  As a union representative and political mover and shaker, Robbie traveled more than two hundred days a year working politicians, the unions and other special interest groups. If he had been out of town when things went crazy, his wife would have been lost without him.

  The governor had been right about Los Angeles rioting if the power went out. But the Cowboy Governor, as Robbie had begun to call him in his head, had no way to predict a nuclear attack on his state, and they had all failed to foresee the racially-fueled meltdown of every major metropolitan area in California big enough to have low-income housing.

  That morning, Robbie called in via satellite connection to participate in a Governor’s Working Group. There had been more than thirty California political functionaries on the conference call. Robbie just listened.

  Each new tidbit of information on the call was more terrifying than the last. The state representative from FEMA knew the most about conditions across the nation. While the initial power failure and nuke attack had struck the West Coast, the East Coast had a growing catastrophe of its own.

  Without any obvious cause, rolling blackouts ravaged the Eastern seaboard from Ontario to South Carolina. Harried authorities at FEMA and Homeland Security could only speculate that the Russians had jumped at the chance to unleash the same malware virus they used against Ukrainian power companies in 2016. Government agencies stopped short of accusing Russia for the nuclear attack because there was no evidence, but it seemed increasingly likely that the Russians were using hackers to shut down power plants in the East, ensuring a full-blown national meltdown.