Veronica answered with a single sentence. “Stephen, you see de animal, but you don’t see de beast.” And with that, she sprang into action.
The mother directed her son to go down to the basement and grab two black bags she’d packed with survival gear for a journey. Without hesitation, she ran into their rooms and pulled out warm clothing, changing her own clothes at the same time, all in a flash.
Coming up from the basement with the bags, Stephen asked what was in them. “Don’t ask questions, child,” Veronica said. “Act.” She directed Stephen to change into the clothes that she’d just pulled out for him—hiking gear in layers and warm boots—as she went into the kitchen to gather food and water. Within fifteen minutes, they’d left their house and were setting out on foot through the city… toward Brooklyn.
****
At the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge was an almost unknown cold war era nuclear fallout bunker. Veronica had come across it while working at the Brooklyn Bridge Park because it was adjacent to a storage facility where she kept all of her tools. She remembered reading about the discovery of the bunker in 2006, when city workers had stumbled upon it during the course of routine inspections. It had been long forgotten, and as soon as it was discovered, it was forgotten again, but Veronica had not forgotten about the bunker at all. She’d previously wheedled her way into getting a key to the bunker from a city clerk who was easily confused by the numbers on a blueprint. Now, the two of them, mother and son, wound their way through the city toward the stone enclosure in the hopes that they would find it still functional.
Having a goal and a plan has a huge impact on the mental state when things fall apart. As they walked, she saw people moving in circles, running heedlessly, or sometimes just standing and gaping with their mouths open and their eyes blank in horror, confusion, or indecision.
The city had been wreaked by havoc in the past week, and now havoc had turned into a conflagration. Fires and destruction were everywhere around them, and Veronica and Stephen took advantage of the mayhem to move silently and purposefully through the city. They moved along the side streets, dipping into Central Park, and then back along the thoroughfares that would lead them downtown, making their way so that they avoided as many people as possible. Before leaving the house, Veronica had slipped a small pistol into her waistband, a gift from her husband on the Christmas before he died, and she hoped that she would not have to use it.
As Stephen followed her, he tried to ask her questions about why they were leaving so quickly, and where they were going, but Veronica simply kept his mind occupied by telling him stories of his father.
“You know, your grandfather was a man who was admired by everyone who knew him. He was an engineer, and he built buildings in Trinidad that were not as tall as these you see here…” she motioned to a building that was ablaze in the distance, its giant face perforated by the wings of a second aircraft that had fallen from the sky only moments before, “…but they were impressive nonetheless.” She focused on blocking out the horror, and directed her mind towards that which she had to do to eliminate panic in herself and her son. There was no shaking in her voice, only calm and certainty.
“When he met your father, he asked him what he’d do if he ever found himself in trouble. You know – what he’d do if things fell apart. He was a cantankerous man, your grandfather, and I was his baby, and he wanted to say a little something that might scare John a little, to see what he was made of. Well, if that is what he wanted to do, he failed. Your father answered with an old Trini proverb that immediately won over your grandfather. Your father said, ‘When yuh neighbor’s house on fire, throw water on yours.’
“Do you understand, Stephen?” She looked over at her son as they hustled through the city, reading his thoughts as they passed people who seemed to be crying out for help.
“There are times when we need to be good citizens and help others out. But in moments when it is life and death, we should take care of our own. Do you see what I’m saying?” She paused and saw in his eyes that he was doing the best he could to follow. “There is something terribly wrong here, son. I’m not sure what it is, but I have an idea. Now is not the time to question and fret. Just move your feet and keep your head down. We have to make our way to safety.”
Stephen nodded and tried to keep pace as they wound their way through the city. They passed through the crowds and around the puddling of slushy ice water that was beginning to pour into the streets from the numerous fires that sprang up around them. They headed as straight as they could manage past the infernal turbulence that was the city, toward the safety of the bunker in the bridge.
By evening, they had reached it.
****
From a distance, one could hear the faraway strums of the guitars slowing growing. The distinctive clattering echo of the twang-twicka-twang was matched by the chunky percussion. As the man on the bicycle came closer to the small group of people gathered by the entrance of a parking lot on the Lincoln Highway in Trenton, New Jersey, the group looked up and heard the wailing urgency of the opening lines of a U2 song.
Although they had only moments before been wondering aloud when this waking nightmare would end, when the government would get its act together and deliver food, where the police were in all of this, they happily stopped their grousing for a moment and watched as the bearded, red-haired specter rode up into their midst, and asked if they knew where he could buy some balloons.
“Balloons?!” asked one of the loudest complainers in the group, incredulously. “Have you flipped your gourd, bro? What in the world do you want balloons for? You should be worrying about finding a new coat to replace that nasty thing you’re wearing. And food… you should be worrying about food. And safety. You do know that we’re in the middle of a national emergency, right?”
Looking at the man, they thought they’d sized him up. Perhaps he was a lunatic, flittering along the highway on a bicycle in the snow, heading who knows where. Maybe he didn’t even know, they thought. The red bearded man just smiled and did nothing to dispel this notion.
“Oh, it’s ok,” he said. “I’m not worried about safety. I know how to make myself invisible. But I need some balloons. I’m going to build a rocket ship and float on out of here.” He reached down and turned down his boom box just as U2 was singing about a place where the streets have no name, as if in answer to where he was going. He changed the subject off of himself. “How bad is it out here, anyway?”
They stood together for a moment and talked about the conditions around them, how the grocery stores had been stripped bare since the blizzard, and how the streets had become dangerous in the last few days, and not only at night. One trucker who’d just driven up from Mississippi before the storm told him how he’d run out of gas and his rig had been stranded for a week.
“Yes, well that’s a shame,” the red-haired man said. “It surely is. You know…,” the red bearded man nodded, as if they should know, “…when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he worked by candlelight until it was done.” The red-haired man looked at the crowd of faces around him to see if anyone understood his meaning, but he was met with only blank stares until someone in the gathered group told them all to hush. A woman waved her hand to silence the crowd. She was picking up some news on her radio. The news had interrupted their broadcast to go to live coverage of a man who was going to jump from outer space and parachute back to earth.
“What kind of thing is that to do while the world is going to hell?” someone asked.
“Shhh… quiet!” someone said. “I want to hear this!”
The crowd sat and listened as the radio announcer relayed the sequence of events and watched as a few remaining cars went weaving through the broken down traffic along the highway. The daredevil was plunging towards the ground, and they were all listening in stony silence when there was a loud explosion from a transformer down the street, and the cars and the radio and the red-haired man’s boombox stopped simultaneously, leavi
ng the crowd waiting for a finish to the song that never came.
A groan went up among them. “Oh, what now?!” But the red-haired man did not ask this question. He seemed to know what was coming next, or maybe he just did not care, which to the observer looked like the same thing. He unstrapped the bungees that held his boombox to the handlebars of his bicycle and tossed the hunk of now useless plastic onto a pile of trash stacked near the road and mounted his bicycle and wished the crowd well.
He pushed off from the curb and headed up the highway with his bicycle, leaving the crowd open-mouthed as they watched him slowly pedal through the stalled cars and the snow and pedestrians, weaving slowly in and out until his image grew increasingly smaller in the distance.
And then, true to his word, he disappeared.
****
Mikail’s guards were now his captors. He had not been “officially” arrested yet. The cease-fire agreement supposedly allowed him twenty-four hours, until midday on Wednesday, to cede control of Warwick and to surrender to the coalition force that now had supremacy in the village. The coalition had neither great leadership nor any concrete plans for how to move forward or deal with the burgeoning crisis. What they had were the Russian Special Forces soldiers, and for now that would be enough.
In Warwick, there was a broad array of emotions; anger, regret, horror, sadness, even hope. This stew of feelings led the people to be weary from the day’s sudden and terrible events, and to hunger for a moment of rest. The coalition held, and the Spetznaz were able, for a time, to maintain an uneasy peace. People stopped battling one another and began to pick through the shattered homes and damaged storefronts. Bodies were being washed and prepared for burial, crimes were being catalogued, and some arrests were being made. There were apologies, accusations, and the promise of recriminations. The prison in Warwick once again held the unhappy losers in a long, grand, and sad social experiment.
“You will be held responsible for the actions of Vladimir and his team,” a coalition ‘advisor’ warned Mikail, as if his control over Vladimir had been anything more than nominal to begin with.
“I cannot be held responsible for the actions of people who have long since gone off on their own and who fail to obey me,” Mikail responded. He was being untruthful. While Vladimir certainly had a mind of his own, the young man was not entirely “off on his own.” Whatever were his private motivations, he was still ostensibly working for Mikail as his team made their way through town, searching for Vasily and the way out.
Just before noon, someone turned on the radio, and the guarded
—along with the guards—listened to the world melt down in real time. After a quick rundown of the condition of America, including woefully rapid and undetailed reports of riots, economic collapse, stores being stripped to the very shelf lining, fuel shortages, nuclear plant shut downs, and impotent government responses, the news cut to the story of a German man jumping from a balloon in space.
Mikail was only half-listening to the broadcast, but he snapped to full attention when the radio buzzed and then zapped and then fell silent while simultaneously the lighting failed and the rumble of the generators gave way to a preternatural silence. A smile crossed Mikail’s face just as another messenger came through the door of the gymnasium with a message from Vladimir.
****
A strange-looking vehicle, something like an ill-considered hybrid between an RV and a highly hardened off-road vehicle, made its way through the winding mountain roads of northern West Virginia. From a distance, the vehicle looked like some kind of transformer vehicle created by Hollywood for a blockbuster summer movie. It was chaperoned by a contingent of black, military looking vehicles, Humvees, APCs, and SUVs. The lead vehicle was a large and heavily armored truck with what looked like a cattle mover or snowplow attached to the front of it. When necessary, this lead truck would push stranded and inoperative vehicles off the road.
“The warhead would have been delivered by a very small rocket,” the driver of the hardened RV said. “The amount of energy used to propel the craft containing the warhead would have been insignificant because the launch platform, the capsule, was brushing the stratosphere, and that means that it almost certainly did not trigger any warnings from NORAD or any of the other early warning systems. It was not a ground based launch. It wasn’t even a high-altitude launch from a Russian bomber...I mean most bombers have a service ceiling of around 50,000 feet, and we’re talking close to 130,000 feet here. And it wasn’t one of these mostly theoretical weapons that might be deployed from a high earth orbit satellite. No. No, this capsule was in the middle area, where no one was looking for it. It was perfect.”
The passenger of the RV stared forward out of the windscreen and nodded his head, but he didn’t interrupt with the questions that filled his mind as the driver spoke. The driver wasn’t finished talking, so the passenger just nodded his head as the man continued.
“The EMP probably will not have knocked out absolutely everything, and it was most likely ‘local’ to maybe a little more than a third of the U.S. It was just a first blow, opening the door for further strikes that will finish the job throughout the rest of the country. I am speculating, of course, but from our figures and the readings we gathered back at the base, I’d say the warhead was detonated high over eastern Ohio. We’d be totally guessing if we tried to declare a yield, but I’d say that more than 95% of the electronics, computer, and technological infrastructure on the eastern seaboard – from Maine to most of Florida, and from the Atlantic to as far as Nebraska, will have been fried. There are probably fires burning out of control in every major city in that area, and the fires will get worse as time goes on because there’ll be no water to dowse them. The trucks that put out fires won’t work, and the communications that control emergency response is now gone, and probably forever. The damage done will make the work of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow look like child’s play.
“The few vehicles that are operating, those that are older and therefore not susceptible to EMP, along with those that were accidentally or purposefully shielded—like these vehicles for example—will stop operating when they’re either unable to move about due to the blockages and mayhem on the roads, or as soon as they run out of stored fuel.” The driver looked over at the passenger and nodded his head, then leaned forward and looked upward through the windshield. “I reckon almost 3,000 planes have crashed, if that gives you any inkling of what’s happened so far today.” He looked back down at the dashboard and then at his watch. “Everything has changed,” he said, “and it all happened in a moment. In a split second of time.”
The passenger looked out at the country road, and, as he did, the old John Denver song about a country road in West Virginia came over the sound system in the RV. His mind flashed to a time not that long ago. Denver had died in the crash of a single person experimental aircraft. Sometimes the irony—or maybe it was the poetic symmetry—is particularly rich.
The man in the passenger seat thought of all those planes falling out of the sky, and realized that none of them were natural. He looked towards the driver, just as the man ended his dissertation on the EMP weapon that had just detonated over the eastern United States. All the while, the voice of John Denver sang on.
The passenger strummed his fingers on the armrest and thought about all those billions of miles of wire that had been strung across the landscape and buried under ground, and thought about how humankind had now hung itself with its own rope. Time had proven, as it inevitably must, that man had strayed too far from the dirt, which is his natural home. Like Icarus, he’d flown too close to the sun, and now he’d had his wings clipped. The forces of spiritual physics, and gravity, and inertia were likely to bring everything back to earth eventually, and it looked like that homecoming was now in the offing. John Denver was singing that he should have been home yesterday.
“So… how did you know? I mean, how did you absolutely know without a doubt that the EMP would actually be deployed, and whe
n it would happen?”
The driver looked over to the passenger and smiled beneath his thick mustache, and his eyes betrayed just the hint of a twinkle that accompanied the smile. “Did your grandmother ever just know it was going to rain? And when she told you to come in before the rain started, did you know to listen to her?”
CHAPTER 17
Tuesday - Afternoon
Vladimir and his team quickly returned to the gymnasium after it happened, interrupting their violent, but fruitless search of Warwick. Vladimir was the first to know something was wrong by picking up on a series of static crackles in the street as they were doing their door-to-door searches. He didn’t know what had happened, but for once the brutish fellow showed instincts that were adorned with something other than mindless force. He’d already sent a messenger to Mikail to tell him that his wild-goose-chase was going poorly and to ask for any further instructions, and now, sensing that something important had happened, he decided that he’d better return to the gymnasium himself in order to see what the power surge had been about.
He was flush from the thrill of the search, energized by the violent power he’d held in his hand, but frustrated that he’d not yet found his target. If truth be told, just at that moment, he was also a bit worried that his power—that one thing he craved so much—would be questioned because of his failure to locate Vasily and the rumored escape route out of town.
As he stepped inside the gymnasium, the doors creaked on their hinges, and he noticed the room had been darkened. He looked down on the swath of light thrown across the hardwood floors. He watched as his shadow preceded him into the space. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and he grimaced as he looked up at the blank round bulbs in the ceiling above his head.
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