Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘That’d be fookin’ right,’ Aunty Celia muttered to herself.

  The reporter was about to speak again when she stopped, placing a hand to one ear, obviously taking instructions from her producer.

  ‘Right, thank you,’ she said before continuing. ‘We have just received these pictures from a low-orbit commercial satellite that passed over the eastern seaboard of America a short time ago.’

  The screen filled up with black-and-white still shots of New York. The imagery was not as sharp as some of the mil-grade stuff Caitlin had seen over the years, but it was good enough to easily pick out individual vehicles and quite small buildings.

  ‘This picture shows the centre of New York, as of twenty-three minutes ago,’ said the reporter. ‘Our technical department has cleaned up the image, allowing us to pull into a much tighter focus.’

  Caitlin recognised Times Square from above. She quickly estimated the virtual height as being about two thousand metres, before the view reformatted down to something much closer, probably about five or six hundred feet. The Beeb’s IT guys were good. It was a remarkably clear image, but profoundly disturbing. Her brief curse was lost in the gasps and swearing of the other women. Fires, frozen in one frame of satellite imagery, burned throughout the square where hundreds of cars had smashed into each other. Smoke and flames also poured out from a few buildings. Buses and yellow cabs had run up onto the footpath and in some cases right into shopfronts and building facades. But nothing else moved. The photograph seemed to have captured an unnatural, ghostly moment. Not because they were looking at a still shot of a great metropolis in the grip of some weird, inexplicable disaster. But because nowhere in that eerie black-and-white image of one of the busiest cities in the world was there a single human being to be seen.

  * * * *

  2

  NORTH CASCADES NATIONAL PARK, WASHINGTON STATE

  The lower reaches of the Cascades never failed to impress James Kipper. Dropping his backpack for a five-minute rest and a drink of water, he rewarded himself for the morning’s trek with a moment staring down the long, deeply wooded valley up which he had climbed. Snow lay in patches along the well-beaten trail and dropped in wet clumps from the sagging branches of fir and pine which covered the gentle slopes below him in a dense green carpet. He loved it out here. Nature was so powerful, the hand of man so light, you could have been hundreds of years removed from the twenty-first century. The brisk but unseasonably sunny morning had made hiking up the remote valley a rare pleasure for the senses. The air was fragrant with sap and the rich, brown mulch of earth warmed by the sun for the first time in months. A breeze, just strong enough to set the treetops swaying, carried the natural white noise of a nearby stream, running heavy with an early melt. As he stood at the edge of a small plateau he could imagine the landscape below dotted with castles and mounted knights. As the father of a little girl just lately in school, knights and castles and fairytales were seldom far from his mind these days.

  Kipper sucked in a draught of air so clean and cold it hurt all the way down into his chest. But it hurt good. The temperature hadn’t snuck much past the mid fifties but he was well dressed for the hike, and could even feel sweat trickling down the inside of his arms. Another mouthful of icy spring water added pleasantly to the discordant sensations of being both hot and cold in parts. His breath plumed out in front of him and his stomach rumbled, reminding the engineer that it had been four hours since his last substantial meal, a bowl of pork sausages and beans cooked over the coals at his camp site a few miles down-range. Kipper unzipped his Gore-Tex jacket and fished around inside for the protein bar he’d stored in one of the many pockets before setting out that morning. It would be satisfyingly warm and chewy by now.

  He frowned at the buzzing in one of the pockets. A second later the trilling of his satellite phone punched him back into the real world. The phone was a concession to his wife, Barb. Three days a year he was allowed to run around the woods by himself, but as a former New Yorker, Barb had ‘issues’ with his ‘nature-boy shtick’, and insisted that if he was going to go commune with the elves he should at least take a sat phone and GPS locator with him. ‘So we can find your body, before the coyotes and buzzards are finished with it,’ she’d said.

  He took out the heavy lump of hated technology, scowling at the small screen as he realised it wasn’t even her on the line. Judging by the number, the connection ran all the way back to City Hall.

  Well, now I’m really pissed, he thought. Only his wife and the park rangers were supposed to have this number, and, true to her promise, Barb had never actually used it. But apparently she’d gone and given it to some pinhead at work. Unless of course it was telemarketers. Please God, don’t let it be telemarketers.

  He was simultaneously dreading and relishing the prospect as he answered. If this was some asshole in New Delhi trying to sell him a time-share apartment…

  ‘Kipper, are you there?’

  The chief engineer of Seattle City Council closed his eyes and exhaled. ‘Hey Barney. This better be good, man.’

  Whoever had decided there was something worth interrupting his precious hiking holiday for had chosen the messenger well. Barney Tench was his closest friend and probably the only person who could call him right now, safe in the knowledge that he would survive the encounter.

  ‘It ain’t good, Kip,’ said Tench, and now Kipper noticed the tremor in his friend’s voice. Was he scared?

  When Barney spoke again he sounded like he’d just survived a train wreck. Like he was terrified. ‘It’s fucked, man. Totally fucked. You gotta get back here right now. I know it’s your break and all, but we need you – right now.’

  Kipper shivered as a single bead of sweat trickled down his spine before hitting a patch of thermal underwear and being absorbed. ‘What’s up, Barn?’ he asked. ‘Just tell me what’s going on.’

  Tench groaned. ‘That’s it, Kip-nobody knows. Could be a war. Could be a fucking comet strike. We don’t know.’

  ‘A what?’

  His surroundings were completely forgotten now. All of James Kipper’s attention was focused down the invisible connection to his friend and colleague back in the city. A friend who seemed to have lost his marbles.

  ‘What d’you mean “a comet or a war”, Barney? What’s going on?’

  ‘The whole country is gone, Kip. All of it, ‘cept us. And Alaska, I guess. Even Canada’s gone – most of it, anyway, in the east.’

  The ice water he’d just swallowed was sitting very heavily in his stomach, as though he’d gulped down a gallon of the stuff instead of just a mouthful. That might have been anger – he was beginning to suspect this was some sort of prank. Tench was famous for them. When they were rooming together in college, he’d fabricated an entire gala ball at the Grand Hyatt, convincing a couple of college babes to hand out ‘free’, ‘strictly limited’ tickets on campuses all over town. They’d got as drunk as lords sitting in the foyer, dressed in rented tuxedos, watching hundreds of students waving their bogus ball tickets in the face of a bewildered hotel manager. Barney Tench was more than capable of fucking with someone’s head for a laugh. Especially Kipper’s.

  ‘Gone where, Barn?’ he growled. ‘You’re not making any sense.’

  ‘Just gone, Jimmy. Just fucking gone.’ His voice was scaling higher with every word he said. ‘Turn on your locator beacon. There’s a National Guard chopper headed your way soon. They’re gonna pick you up and transfer you to a plane somewhere. It’ll get you straight in here. Council’s called an emergency meeting. All heads of departments. Governor’s office is sending a team, although nobody can find Gary Locke. His schedule had him in transit today. In the air,’ he added, as though that explained everything.

  ‘Barney, is my family safe?’ asked Kipper.

  ‘They’re fine, buddy, they’re fine. Barb gave me your number. Look, I gotta go. The Guard can fill you in. I got a thousand calls to make now I found you. Just fire up that beacon, sit your
ass down and wait.’

  ‘Bar-’

  But the line cut out.

  ‘What the fuck was that about?’ he muttered. Shaking his head, Kipper knelt in front of his pack and popped the snap lock on the pocket containing his personal locator beacon, a small lightweight ACR Terrafix unit. He powered up the little yellow device and couldn’t help searching the skies, even though he knew his ride was probably still an hour away. Assuming it came at all, and Barney wasn’t now roaring with laughter, about to fall backwards off his chair. Who knew?

  Sub-zero air torrents high above him stretched a few scraps of cloud into long white ribbons, streaming away towards the coast. He caught sight of a giant hawk as it dived into the valley, wings folded back.

  ‘Someone’s about to get eaten,’ he thought aloud.

  Then he noticed the contrail, maybe twenty miles further north. The sky was crisscrossed with them during the colder months – great white arcs of vapour trailing the jet liners as they headed for Seattle, or the Pacific and the long haul to Japan or down to Honolulu. There seemed to be fewer than usual, just this one actually, and he had never seen a plane tracking so low over the Cascades before. His unease at the surprise call from Barney tightened into alarm as he watched the slow arc of the aircraft and realised it wasn’t going to clear the mountains towards which it was headed.

  ‘No,’ he whispered, aware that he almost never spoke aloud on his hiking trips, and that he was positively yapping his head off today. ‘No, don’t.’

  His mouth was dry, and he drank from his canteen without thinking. The cold water hit his clenched stomach like acid, and for a second he thought he might vomit. That faraway plane, a thin tube of metal enfolding – what, a hundred, two hundred souls? – slowly, gracefully, inexorably speared itself into the side of a mountain, impacting just over the snow line, freeing great blossoming petals of dirty yellow flame to roll away into the morning air.

  ‘Ah shit…’

  Kipper shook his head and took a few steps towards the small, roiling ball of fire, before he stopped himself. He would never make it, and anyway he had to stay here and wait for the chopper. He apparently had his own disaster to deal with.

  Still, he had to do something. He keyed 911 into his sat phone, glancing down momentarily to check he’d got the numbers right. He could at least call this in. Maybe someone had survived – a ridiculous thought, which he recognised as such as soon as he’d had it. But he couldn’t just stand by with his thumb in his ass, taking in the view, could he?

  ‘Nine-One-One, which service do you require?’ The dispatcher sounded harried, and just as freaked out as Barney had been. But then, Kipper thought, that was probably her normal state of being.

  ‘This is James Kipper, chief engineer, Seattle City Council. I’ve just seen a passenger plane crash. A big jet.’

  The dispatcher’s voice seemed almost mechanical, washed free of human affect by the multiple layers of impossibly complicated technology required to allow Kipper to speak to her from the side of this mountain in the middle of nowhere. ‘Sir, what is your location and the location of the incident?’

  As Kipper told her that he was in central Washington state, in the lower reaches of the Cascades, and read his location off the GPS beacon, the soft rumble of the titanic explosion finally reached him.

  ‘Sir, please repeat. Are you outside the metro area?’

  ‘Yes, damn it. I just watched this plane go down in the mountains. It was flying out of the east and it got too low, and -’

  ‘Are you outside the Seattle metro area, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I -’

  ‘Your call has been logged, sir, but we cannot dispatch anyone right now. Please hang up and leave the line free for genuine emergency calls.’

  And with that he was cut off.

  ‘What the fuck!’ he said, loud enough to startle a flight of birds from a nearby tree. A mass of snow, disturbed by their take-off, fell to the ground with a soft, wet crunch.

  Twenty miles to the north, a pillar of dark smoke climbed away into the hard blue sky. A secondary explosion bloomed silently in the heart of the maelstrom on the face of the granite peak. Kipper was still staring at the phone in disbelief when the sound reached him.

  * * * *

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  The car park of the Safeway on Broadway East could be a challenge at the best of times. Barbara’s little Honda had picked up three mystery scratches or dents in there over the past six months. But today it felt like genuine hell. With one hand she was trying to control a heavily laden trolley sporting at least two malfunctioning wheels, while carrying a sobbing child on her other arm and attempting to redial Kipper’s number on her cell phone. The parking lot was full of hysterics and loons, some of them normal people who’d gone over the edge, others professional nutbars who’d turned up with sandwich boards urging everyone to REPENT as the HOUR OF DOOM was AT HAND!!!! The signs looked quite professional, as though they’d been prepared much earlier for just this occasion. Barb had taken a small measure of childish joy from clipping one of the God botherers with the corner of her fast-moving, barely controlled metal shopping cart.

  She was less pleased with the long scrape she gouged out of the paintwork as she stumbled and lost her grip on the cart just as they made it back to the car. ‘Shit!’

  Suzie, who at six years old was way too big to be carried, one-armed or otherwise, for more than a few steps, struggled to clamber deeper into Barbara Kipper’s embrace. ‘I’m scared, Mommy,’ she cried.

  Struggling with her daughter, Barbara lost her grip on the cell phone – a cheap clamshell model – which fell to the bitumen and broke in two. ‘Oh shit! Oh… I’m sorry, sweetheart. Mommy’s sorry. Just hop down, would you, and…’

  Suzie, her head buried in Barbara’s neck, shook her head and wailed, ‘Noooo.’

  ‘Suffer the little children unto Him, good lady…’

  Barb spun around to find that one of the religious nuts had followed her through the heaving crush of the car park and was holding aloft a small branch of some sort, waving it as if to bless her.

  ‘Suffer the little -’

  ‘I’ll fucking suffer you to get the hell away from me, you goddamn freak! You’re scaring the bejesus out of my daughter.’

  She fixed him with such a baleful stare that he actually seemed to recoil as if struck, but Barbara, who was normally so conscious of others’ feelings, felt not the least bit contrite. This place was a madhouse. It was like people had gone nuts or something when the news first came through, and these holy fucking lunatics were only making it worse.

  Barb managed somehow to lower a clinging Suzie down to the ground while digging her keys out and thumbing the car’s electronic lock. It opened with a reassuring bleep-bloop, lessening her fears that whatever had happened might have put the zap on all the electrics. Back in the store, some bearded panic merchant had jumped up onto a checkout to announce that an ‘electromagnetic event’ had taken out all the circuits, everywhere. Unfortunately for him, the automatic conveyer belt on which he was standing was entirely functional and it jerked forward, pulling his feet out from under him. The last Barb had seen of the man, he was lying on the floor of Safeway with a badly broken ankle.

  His theatrics, combined with the almost instant viral panic that seemed to run through everyone, a couple of fender benders in the parking lot, followed by the inevitable blaring of horns, the trilling of alarms and increasingly ugly screams of abuse – it had all been enough to upset Suzie so badly she was shivering, begging to know where Daddy was, and whether it was ‘Mine Eleven’ happening again. Barbara Kipper soothed her as best she could while pushing the child into the back seat, where her stuffed panda, Poofy Bear, might at least provide some comfort.

  She popped the hatch and transferred the shopping bags as quickly as possible, with no idea of how she was going to get away from here. The lot was a gridlocked nightmare, with people increasingly desperate to leave, backing and crunching int
o each other, while more turned up every minute, presumably to panic-buy a year’s worth of discount Pop-Tarts and Cheeseburgers In A Can – the specials of the day.

  A short distance away, two men were squaring up for a fight. An actual fight. One was huge, enormously obese, while the other looked tall and fit. God only knew what they were pissed at each other about. Perhaps the big guy got the last of the cheeseburgers. They circled each other, feinting and throwing out air punches, and then, much to Barb’s surprise, the thinner of the two bent over and charged the other guy like a rhino, head-butting him in the gut. They went down in a tangle as police or maybe ambulance sirens seemed to be closing in from somewhere nearby. Barbara shook her head in disgust and threw the last of her groceries into the hatch.

  Having unloaded the cart, she didn’t dare push it back to the collection bay, for fear of leaving Suzie alone for even a moment. She could have killed Kipper at this point. He would choose this of all weeks to disappear into the mountains.