“I suppose we can go check out the water plant, but if we go, everything needs to go with us. We’ll just stay there. We’ll have to find a way to obscure our footprints from the snow, and we’ll have to move quickly and silently. We’ll surface only meters outside the fence, and if there are patrols in Warwick, then they would see us. We’ll need to be ready to run for it.”
“This will be the most dangerous thing we’ve done yet,” Lang said, nodding his head.
“Well, I disagree with that, Lang,” Peter said. Cole nodded, agreeing with Peter. “Your trip from here back to the gym and then through the town door to door was extremely dangerous, and perhaps not a little stupid,” Cole gently agreed, and the three let Lang bask in that recognition for a moment.
Natasha smiled. “I’m glad you did it, Lang. I’d hate to be back there in Warwick, trying to hide from the mob or from Mikail’s goons.”
“Well, we aren’t out of Warwick yet,” Peter said. “Perhaps it is good that we leave now. We’ll get some distance between us and that stinking pit of a town.”
****
An unabridged retelling of the historic mad dash from the tunnel’s exit to the water plant might be in order someday, if the story ever gets told in its entirety. The escape was historic, because, as far as any of them knew, no one had successfully escaped Warwick and gotten away since the great confusion in ’92. It was mad because the four individuals who made the escape had no idea what awaited them on the outside. They did not know if anyone, perhaps even the Americans, still patrolled the forest. They did not know if the Russian Spetznaz had snipers or soldiers watching the perimeter to prevent escapes. They did not know if they would run into mayhem or violence in the forest from people escaping the cities, and they did not know if the water plant was occupied—if perhaps gangs of refugees were using the treatment facility as a hideout or headquarters. In short, they knew nothing, and that is what made their historic escape an act of madness. It was a rush into the unknown.
But they made it, and, in reality, the whole escapade went off without a hitch. They poked their heads up into the clear cold air outside the fences of Warwick, and they saw neither soldiers nor gangs. The first sprint into the deeper forest was accomplished purely on adrenaline, a pounding heart terror that embraced and squeezed the mind. After the four of them were clear of the open and lightly treed area, they moved slower and more circumspectly. They used branches to try to obscure their direction, and several times they doubled back in order to hide their intended path.
They didn’t know how successful they’d been, and wouldn’t know for some time, but they did make it to the water plant, and, once there, they did a thorough reconnaissance of the plant before digging in for a stay that they figured to last four or five days.
“I say we stay until Friday,” Peter said. “By Friday, we’ll know more about if the EMP has actually taken place, and what its ramifications are.”
“You’re the leader, Peter,” Cole said, as he walked around the sheet-metal covered work shed that they’d chosen as their temporary home.
“Yes, Peter,” Natasha said, nodding. “We’re with you, so you tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.”
“Ok, then,” Peter said, “we’ll need to gather up some wood for a fire. This place is ventilated up near the roof, and it’ll be cold at night, but we can use several different tricks to stay warm. The EMP, if it is coming, hasn’t happened yet, so our main threats, if they come, will come from Warwick. After the EMP, it won’t get any worse immediately, so we shouldn’t have to worry about strangers hiking through the woods quite yet.”
“Well, Peter,” Cole said, scratching his head, “if what you are saying is accurate, and I have no reason to believe that it isn’t, then why don’t we head out on our walk now? Wouldn’t that give us a few more days lead time before things get bad?”
“Not really, Cole,” Peter said. “The EMP is supposed to happen today. That means all sorts of things can happen, including planes dropping out of the sky, explosions from power lines and transformers, fires, and all sorts of things that remain unknown to us. In addition, the violence could break out almost immediately when the EMP hits—not here, but out there—and it will grow over several days. We’re hoping that the biggest brunt of the effects—after people realize that they are in big, big trouble—will happen in the first three days. After that, it won’t be much better, but at least we will be able to watch where we are, where we are going, and what is ahead of us. If we go now, we could find ourselves in the middle of trouble in unknown territory when the match strikes the fuse. I just think we should wait and then make our way once we have more information.”
“Like we said, Peter, you’re in charge,” Cole responded with a smile. In his smile, he hinted at the smallest bit of doubt.
****
Peter opened up his pack and pulled out one of the radios he brought from the house. He left Clay’s radio in the ammo can, just in case, but he wanted to listen awhile, to hear what life was like outside, and gather whatever intelligence they could while they still had the opportunity.
Lang, Natasha, and Cole crowded around Peter as he tuned the radio, and before long he found a station that was on the air. The newswoman went through a litany of stories about the recent “troubles.” There were reports of riots and looting in the cities, places like Boston, and Philadelphia, but most of it was less dire than the Warwickians had heard from inside the village. Lang reminded them that one of the last things Lev Volkhov had told him was that they shouldn’t believe anything they hear, especially from the “authorities.” Governments will lie about the extent of unrest and violence, if only to keep that violence from spreading to as-yet unaffected areas.
It seemed from the news broadcast that the authorities were trying to make the recent troubles and turmoil out to be purely economic. As of this morning, the reports said, the stock market had crashed in a magnitude unseen in history. Despite what seemed to be obvious attempts to minimize the extent of the disruptions, the reporter mentioned riots and street disturbances in most of the big cities of America, civic unrest and citizen complaints about delays in food relief efforts, and they were now speaking openly of an event they were calling “The Crash.” The fact that many of the riots had preceded the stock market collapse seemed all but forgotten, and the fact that Election Day was postponed in the northeast was not even mentioned. You would think that something so monumental might be in the news on that first Tuesday in November. But if you thought that, you would be wrong.
****
If a mission to Mars had landed on that undiscovered planet and the astronauts had descended onto its barren rocky surface only to find that their radios were tuned to a broadcast from Olympus Mons, the effect wouldn’t have been any stranger than it was on the four Warwickians who sat and listened to the details of a news broadcast from a place they had only known through reputation. They crowded around the small radio there in the water plant and listened to a report about some crazy German who was about to jump out of a capsule that hung from a parachute on the edge of space. Apparently, with all that was happening in the world, somebody, somewhere, someone of great importance, had decided that a man perhaps jumping to his death for notoriety was newsworthy, while the society crumbling around them was not.
The reporter breathlessly turned away from the description of the day’s and week’s events, of the tales of hunger and societal breakdown, of the scrambling of the governmental elites to contain the situation, to speak of a daredevil, a Mr. Klaus von Baron, who at that very moment was stepping onto a platform and seeing the wide world float through space beneath his feet. The reporter described it all. Millions of people were watching the event all over the world on YouTube, the newswoman reported. After completing what the reporter called “his egress checks,” Klaus von Baron stepped off the platform and threw himself toward the ground, and the reporting paused as he began his awesome free-fall.
There were gasps and oohs and aa
hs coming from the newsroom as the newswoman described the event. “Klaus von Baron has begun to spin slightly. From the deck of his capsule we can see that he is disappearing into the haze of atmosphere and distance. There is, of course, a fear that he might go into an uncontrollable flat spin that could cause him to pass out.” The reporter relayed these facts as though the audience perfectly understood the machinations of velocity and turbulence, but it was necessary to say them anyway, just as a record for the times. The audience was informed that von Baron had a special parachute that would automatically activate if the g-forces came to be too much and he lost consciousness.
The four sat and listened. The reporter was openly speculating about whether or not von Baron was going to break the sound barrier, when the four Warwickians, listening around the radio, heard a loud pop, and the radio went dead.
Simultaneously they heard an intense, buzzing hum, and from the doorway of the water plant they saw an old transformer atop a power pole, one that was no longer even operating, blow completely off the pole. As it did so, they heard a frightening explosion from the power junction box about twenty feet inside the building. It suddenly burst into flames.
Peter knew immediately what had happened. Somewhere, up in the atmosphere, and probably not too far away, a “super-EMP” warhead had detonated sending a wave of supercharged electrons piling up on one another until they had burst outward, like when the sound barrier is shattered. The resulting massive wave of electromagnetic energy had spread throughout the atmosphere and imploded the grid of electric energy, and with it the comforts and hopes and aspirations of the world’s long climb to what modern man recognized as civilization.
At the moment, Peter was one of the few people in the entire world to know that everything had changed. For everyone. Forever.
CHAPTER 16
Tuesday Afternoon – Election Day
The etiology of disaster’s onset and the projection of its effects are never easy things to pin down, but history does provide examples for our consideration. On March 4, 1918, in a small town in Kansas, a cook at an army training camp called in sick. Within a week, over 500 men in the camp had contracted the illness, and the virus had spread all the way to Queens, New York. Within a year, approximately fifty million people worldwide had died of what came to be known as the Spanish Flu. Up to 30% of the world’s population contracted the disease. Coupled with the concurrent devastation visited upon the world in the four short years of World War One, wherein sixteen million people died and another twenty million were seriously wounded, you can see how quickly things changed in the four short years between 1914 and 1918. The lesson for us is that history can turn on a dime. All the sophisticated machinery of modern civilization is no match for the wild rampage of nature and the brutality of human ingenuity.
While this may seem like an extreme example—as if a wartime virus is worse than the collapse of the electrical grid upon which modern society is built—consider the fact that when the lights go out, there is no medical equipment for use in treating disease. There is no transportation to get food or people or supplies from one place to another. There is no telephone to call the police when the criminals show up at your door. There is no Internet, no security alarms, no heating or air-conditioning to tame the elements. In a grid-down situation, and especially if that situation is caused by a massive electromagnetic pulse, there is no gasoline, and there are no automobiles to need that gasoline. There is no refrigeration to cool food in the concrete jungles that house most of the world’s population. When this disaster occurs, there will only be darkness, and stillness, and whatever you hold in your hands, head, and heart to face down the long night.
The EMP strike over Ohio on Election Day in America was the crime of this and perhaps any century, and it would lead—eventually—to over 300 million deaths just in the United States, and many billions of deaths all over the world, but no one knew that yet.
At the very beginning, it was like the call coming in to the kitchen staff saying that a cook won’t be in that day. It was like a woman who was involved in a car wreck and broke her neck, but she didn’t know it yet. An hour later, she was talking to a cop, and she turned her head to point out to him exactly where the collision occurred, and the cop heard the snap, and her head fell to the side, and the body fell limp to the ground.
There is a delay between the moment when a trigger is pulled, and the moment when a target is struck. That interim—that delay, however long it lasts—is when the world continues to move and decide based on the old reality and on facts that are now immaterial. It is in that interim that decisions are often made that will eventually determine who lives and who dies.
No one had yet figured out what had happened, although people knew from the fires and the smoke and the already eerie noise of the gnashing of teeth in the stillness, that something had gone terribly wrong. But no one yet had recognized its permanency.
Still, in that moment, a few kept their heads.
****
Veronica D’Arcy was sitting in her kitchen in her warm house in Harlem, writing in her journal, when the lights went out.
She’d been thinking a great deal lately of her late husband John, a gem of a man, gone too soon due to a heroic attempt to save a woman who’d fallen on the tracks from a subway platform years ago. The woman was saved, but her husband had not survived, leaving Veronica to raise their son by herself.
In the way that thoughts sometimes seem to tumble or intermingle like towels in a dryer, or how one thought brings us inexorably to another, Veronica’s thoughts about her husband, and heroism, and the life of responsibility, led her to recall the man named Clay Richter who’d recently stayed at her house for a night. Apparently, Clay had lost his whole family in an automobile accident. The simple, sweet man had touched her life through an act of kindness towards her son, and now, as she sat thinking about Clay and his escape from the city and his search for liberty and peace, she began thinking about family and the loss of it and the need to protect her own.
Her son, Stephen, was in their living room working on a laptop. He was staying home from school for yet another day, as all New York students were. The compounded troubles from several successive natural and unnatural disasters were taking a toll on the city. First there was the hurricane, then the blizzard, and now there was increasing civil disorder resulting from the canceling of the national elections.
Veronica herself hadn’t been able to return to work since Sandy hit. She was a landscape designer at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and with everything going on post-hurricane, there’d been no need for her to go to work. She’d been told to stay home, and now she and Stephen had been inside for days on end. She thought about it and then counted on her fingers. It was exactly a week ago Tuesday that Clay Richter had helped her son and had stayed the night in the guest room. It seemed longer to her.
She’d grown up in the house of a man who believed in preparation, like his father before him had, a vestigial leftover from colonial-days thinking in Trinidad, when life was uncertain and one had to always be ready to take whatever steps were necessary to maintain it. An aware mind and a preparedness mentality were some of the values that had attracted her to John, who was a survivalist in his own right.
She and Stephen had been protected from the civil unrest raging outside by her foresight in planning for emergencies. They had a generator, and they had always stockpiled food, and had acquired over the years, through self-education, the means to protect themselves from the kind of madness that had increasingly gripped the city. Still, she was getting antsy to get out of the house, and Stephen, too, was looking for diversion.
He was in the living room when the lights flashed and blinked out and the power died. He’d been watching on the laptop at that moment as a daredevil jumped out of a weather balloon and plunged over twenty-four miles toward the earth.
I wonder if he lived, is what Stephen thought as the computer and the room went dark. Strange, he thought. I wonder why t
he computer didn’t keep running on battery power?
The click of the lights and whirr of the winding-down machinery had been the first signs that there was trouble. Then Veronica heard an explosion down the street, followed by numerous collisions and grindings and blasts. Thinking about the laptop, and why the thing had just instantly shut down, Stephen had been the first to ask why the sounds of cars in the streets had stopped if only the electricity had shut down. Just as Veronica was about to answer, they heard a whistling grow above their heads.
Veronica ran to the door with Stephen just a foot behind her, and they stuck their heads out the door and saw in the space above their street an airplane crossing through the blue sky. It was spooky the way the craft simply hung in the air without the sound of engines whining as it made its descent. It was all Doppler Effect of gravity and the atmosphere pushing against the hunk of metal in the sky. The plane turned in a slow, lazy arc and settled into a pocket of air, which made the whooshing noise they’d heard as wind rushed around its wings.
The crashing noise could not have been more than half a mile away. Veronica could have sworn that she felt the ground rumble under her feet before they heard the awful explosive clatter of the plane crashing into the city. Her thoughtful eyes scanned down to the street and noticed the cars clogging up the main artery of the street down the block, and the people running toward the sound of the crash. Images and fragmented memories of 9/11 flashed through her head. Veronica pushed her son back into the house, and the young man looked at her his eyes full of fright, and he asked her what was happening.
Wick - The Omnibus Edition Page 28
