LOSS OF REASON

by Miles A. Maxwell

  Everon looked from the map to Andréa. “Teterboro.”

  She changed the radio frequency.

  But there was no response from that airport either.

  “Look!” she said. “That highway.” She glanced down at the chart. “We’re here,” she pointed, suddenly took the yoke and banked the jet on a course thirty degrees south.

  “Teterboro area traffic,” Everon called, “Learjet One-Oscar-Mike—anyone know if the runway is useable?”

  Nobody answered.

  Andréa began an uncomfortable pass along the runway’s right side. “How’s it look?” she asked. “I—I can’t see anything.”

  “No active planes on the field,” Everon said. “I don’t see chunks of debris or anything. The lights are pretty dim though. Runway numbers aren’t too clear. A lot of dust, maybe?”

  “No beacon on the tower,” Andréa breathed. “No strobes. Runway lights barely visible. I don’t know . . . ”

  “They’re probably on emergency power,” Everon said. “It’s the best shot we’ve got. Let’s take it.” He called again: “Teterboro area traffic. Learjet One-Oscar-Mike turning downwind, Runway Two-Four.”

  Franklin buckled himself in.

  Andréa took a deep breath. Turned forty degrees or so and entered the approach pattern—any moment ready to pull up. Not being able to talk to the tower was unsettling. If there was something on the runway, it could be the last landing she’d ever make.

  “Learjet Oscar-Mike, Gulfstream Six-One-Six-One-Sierra-Golf, here. About six miles out. We’ll follow you.”

  Another jet? Behind us?

  “Okay, Sierra-Golf,” Everon radioed.

  “Cross your fingers,” Andréa muttered. She pulled on the throttles to reduce power.

  The runway was wet when they touched down, and looked dirty. Andréa taxied them over next to two other small jets parked inside the airport’s chain-link fence.

  Everon hadn’t lived in New Jersey for years. But he knew it well. It wouldn’t be the first time the land surrounding Teterboro had been flooded by storm. It was the first time the result could be so deadly.

  He had the side door open before they stopped moving.

  “Wait here,” he yelled and disappeared.

  Through the door Franklin watched a larger jet set down on the runway they’d just vacated. Over the next ten minutes two more landed, parked parallel wing-to-wing with them down the line.

  A dark-haired man wearing a black leather jacket, and a rail-thin woman whose straight blonde hair hung over the shoulders of her shiny red coat, leaned their faces into the Learjet’s open door. Both probably in their thirties, tanned as if they’d just spent a week on a Florida beach.

  “Anybody know what’s going on?” the woman asked nervously.

  “An Ohio radio station claimed the device was nuclear,” Franklin told her.

  “We know it’s nuclear,” a male voice rumbled behind her in the dark.

  A sudden bright white glow appeared in the distance. BOOM! The sound hit them as it faded back to red.

  “What was that! Was that a plane?”

  Like a series of bombs going off, half a dozen smaller explosions followed.

  Helicopters zoomed overhead, their spotlights sweeping for potential landing areas. People trying to talk all at once. Craziness reigned.

  The woman had backed up enough to let Franklin step into the cold air. He edged forward.

  It smelled of smoke and dust outside. There were more people behind her.

  One man, face pink with cold, in a high voice said, “I got a report on a portable. The station we picked up over West Virginia said the Mayor of New York’s missing.”

  “They think he’s dead,” somebody said.

  “The deputy’s in charge.”

  “Where’s the President?”

  Everybody started talking at once.

  Everon ran up out of breath. “Let’s go! Got us a small four-place helicopter. The last weather briefing says we’ve only got a few hours to fly in, do our own search—find Cynthia, Steve and Melissa, before the wind changes and blows the fallout back in our direction.”

  “Everyone’s supposed to be subject to military law, even the police,” said a dark-skinned man.

  “We’ll see,” Everon said, Franklin grabbing his gear.

  “Do you want my help?” Andréa said, as Franklin stepped from the jet. Everon didn’t answer.

  “You’re going in there?” the thin woman in red called after them, voice jittery and rising.

  But Franklin and Everon had already disappeared into the darkness.

  Climbing gear bags and rope slung over both shoulders, in the dim airport lights Franklin chased after his older brother, around the rear of Runway 24.

  “Any danger of radiation coming this way?” he yelled.

  “Wind’s blowing away from us!” Everon shouted back. “Toward Long Island. For now!”

  On the other side of the airport a small red helicopter had been rolled from one of the metal hangars.

  “It’s a four-place Robinson,” Everon said. “It’ll do to lift us all out.”

  Franklin stared at the big black tail number.

  666KI. Red and black. The devil’s helicopter.

  “If we can find them,” Everon added, climbing into the right seat. He began to flip various switches. “I had to practically buy the thing before they’d rent it to me. Took half my spare cash.”

  “Have you flown this type before?” Franklin asked.

  “Not so loud,” Everon whispered. “Ten, eleven hours or so.” He hit the starter. With a high-pitched screech, the engine began to turn over. As its two long blades began to rotate overhead, Everon handed Franklin a headset.

  “Hear me?” Everon asked.

  “I hear you.”

  Everon scanned the gauges, adjusted controls. “Alright.” He put his right hand on the yoke, his left between the front seats, lifted the collective arm off the floor, and began to twist a handle on its end like a motorcycle grip. The engine’s sound increased.

  From nowhere, a thick blue arm appeared in front of Everon, snaked inside and turned the key. The engine died instantly.

  “What the hell are you doing!” Everon screamed.

  A bright light shined in their eyes. “All air travel is suspended,” said a clipped nasal voice.

  “What!” Everon growled.

  The light turned away. Franklin could barely make out the short, dark-haired man, right hand on a big hip gun, standing on Everon’s right. He had a tight, authoritative look on his small mouth. He had tiny eyes. TETERBORO AIRPORT SECURITY across his blue jacket and cap. A silver name tag said VANDERSOMMEN.

  “The controller’s radios are out. They’ve got hand-delivered military orders. We’re coming under martial law.” He bounced on the soles of his shiny black shoes. Almost happy about it.

  Everon exploded: “SONOFABITCH!”

  Connections

  From a minute after eight o’clock, David Niece found he had no heat, no water, no refrigeration and no public method of communication. He thought he’d heard the sound of thunder. But when he went outside, the stars twinkled through a sky that was dark and clear.

  Nobody was allowed to build on the hills outside Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania anymore, but the house had been in his family since 1928—his only neighbor out of sight, isolated by trees and distance. The house was above the frost line, but his little gas generator out back started on the first pull. He plugged in the three thick yellow extension cords that ran through a hole drilled in the house’s side. He heard the well pump turn on. He’d lost power before. He could run whatever he really needed to. He had a cord-and-a-half of wood stacked up for the winter.

  But it was the fact that all the radio and TV stations his satellite dish usually pulled i
n were off the air that really worried him. From his porch above the Delaware Water Gap, David watched a stream of westbound cars fill Interstate 80.

  He got into his old El Camino and drove down the hill. Maybe he could find out what the hell was going on.

  At the mini-mart, people jammed the aisles. Just inside the front doors, David kept out of the way, watched and listened.

  Contorted faces, a desperation he’d never seen before, pulling hot dog buns and candy and soda and water randomly, fast as they could empty the shelves.

  “Goddammit! I had those marshmallows first!” yelled a big walrus.

  “You sonofabitch! You took ’em right out of my kid’s hand!” a tough little guy screamed back.

  Fists flew. Nobody—not even the store manager seemed to care.

  And David pieced it together.

  “My brother was just in New York, day before yesterday!”

  “Anybody who was downtown is toast!”

  “Shut up! My sister lives in Battery Park!”

  “Sorry!”

  “Anybody know who did it?”

  He got back into his car and raced up the hill. Shit! An atom bomb! In New York!

  At the top of his house was an attic stairway. At the top of the stairs he threw open a white door that bore a small sign.

  TOP OF THE WORLD, it said.

  He sat down and plugged in a black power cord he never kept connected—in case of lightning strikes—to the yellow extension cord on the floor nearby. He flipped on a speaker and began transmitting over his ham radio.

  Even on weekends, with the exception of three unemployed derelicts who closed down the town’s only bar every night, the people of Marysville, Ohio—population 12,336—went to bed early.

  “Ben! Wake up!” Susan Coupe shook her husband violently. “Ben!”

  “Huh?” answered Ben Coupe. “What time is it?” Susan had the light on.

  “Nine o’clock. Somebody’s at the door!”

  Their doorbell hadn’t worked in three years, but Ben heard the pounding echo through the old house.

  He blinked, squinted, pain shooting down his left arm as he reached for and missed a terrycloth robe hanging over a chair alongside the bed. A shoulder diagnosed with bursitis had bothered him for the last two years.

  He slid his bare feet to the floor and pulled the robe on.

  BOOM! BOOM! The pounding came louder this time.

  He flipped on the stairway light and headed down. “Hold on, hold on! I’m coming!”

  Ben opened the front door to find Cheryl—Susan’s sister—and her live-in boyfriend Matt standing on the porch, wearing winter coats over pajamas and slippers, eyes wide with terror.

  “Oh, my God!” Cheryl blurted as they ran forward. “Matt was up listening to that damned CB again—”

  “Good thing too!”

  “Shut up, Matt!” Cheryl screamed.

  “What is it, Cheryl?” Susan asked coming into the living room behind Ben.

  “Suze!” she yanked the front of her sister’s bathrobe, “The phones are out! New York City’s been bombed!”

  “What!” Ben said. “New York? Is the whole country under attack? Who—”

  Without thinking, Susan lifted the phone. A dial tone hummed back. “Ours is working.”

  At 8:33, Des Moines, Iowa time, the telephone rang in the apartment of Kim Martin and her two daughters. It was Kim’s brother, Brian, calling from Canadian—a town halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo, north Texas.

  “New York?” she said. “He called you from Ohio? That’s a pretty close friend for an old college buddy. Did he say who did it?”

  “Ben knows we do some nuclear warhead work down here,” Brian explained. “He wanted to find out what I thought. The Amarillo television stations aren’t on the air and my satellite dish isn’t working. I can get one radio station, that’s it. The President hasn’t said anything yet—but look, Kimmie—I’m on my way out the door right now. I’ve only got a few bucks. I’m gonna hit the cash machine.”

  Kim ran with the portable phone to the kitchen for a look in her purse. “Shit!” she yelped. “I’ve only got a twenty, Brian.”

  “Girls!” she yelled. “Get your coats! You can wear your pj’s underneath. Girls! We have to go somewhere in the car for a few minutes! Now!”

  By the time Kim reached her usual ATM, there were already a dozen people in line. When she was one person from the machine, a dark-haired man came walking back toward her counting, and the person directly in front began swearing out the longest string of cuss words she’d ever heard, then turned and ran after the dark-haired man.

  A message flashed in the ATM window:

  CASH DEPLETED

  PLEASE TRY ANOTHER LOCATION

  That night, Kim and her daughters drove to three more cash machines.

  There was no line at any of them. The first two were empty. She ran nervously from the last machine. It looked like someone had taken a crowbar to it.

  In the middle of ten thousand acres northeast of Burlington, Kansas, the head night engineer at Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant studied a series of computer readouts. Those two rods on the Number Three Bundle look pretty solid. His systems were operating near maximum output. Good thing too with this New Yor—

  He looked up to see a U.S. Army colonel and four soldiers file in through the main control room door.

  Colonel Devers Broadmore introduced himself, then announced, “By Presidential Executive Order 16-176, all active nuclear power plants are to be immediately shut down. It is our task to see such procedures as necessary are implemented efficiently and safely carried out.”

  The engineer frowned at the colonel. “Shutdown? What!”

  “That’s right, gentlemen.”

  “But I don’t understand. Why us? Way out here? Some of the plants back East maybe. But us? We’re near peak load. If we—”

  “Immediate shutdown, sir!” Colonel Broadmore’s face remained impassive. “Right now!”

  The chief engineer hesitated. He thought of his own house twenty miles away—his wife, his family. Though none of the soldiers were raising weapons, he picked up on a sense of increasing tension in the muscles, the tendons of the hands that held them. The engineer’s jaw muscle worked. He took a deep breath, then stepped to the main console. To the shock of everyone on the plant’s night crew, he entered into the computer a series of commands.

  Deep within the thick-wall concrete containment dome next door, motors whirred. An ear-deafening hissSSSS grew. Control rods of boron, cadmium and silver pushed downward, absorbing neutrons. The nuclear core’s temperature dropped. Steam reverted to water, losing its ability to produce motive force. Generators slowed.

  On the U.S. grid, the sudden gigantic power deficit forced switching engineers to make sudden choices. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, the wave of blackouts rippled outward into Kansas. Lights in ten—twenty—fifty thousand homes went dark as they were taken off the grid. Refrigerators stopped cooling. Hot water heaters stopped heating. Furnaces shut down.

  At the Palo Verde plant west of Phoenix, River Bend north of New Orleans—at sixty-three other generating plants across the United States—the procedure was repeated.

  Eleven million homes went dark.

  In Marysville, Ohio, in the middle of their third phone call, the lights at Ben and Susan Coupe’s house went out. In Des Moines, Iowa, the display on the fourth cash machine Kim Martin tried simply went dead.

  It didn’t return her card.

  Frustration

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Everon’s fist hammered against the metal door. He leaned back, looked up at Teterboro’s control tower, a concrete building of square foundation, tapering six stories to the observation windows above.

  That little red Robinson just sitting over there, he thought, ready to go. Cyn and Steve and Melissa could slide right in the back and we could all get out of here. But once the military sh
ows up— There was no time to waste. Have to get someone to give us clearance right now!

  He drew back his fist for another go when—CLICK!—he heard the lock unlatch.

  The door was opened by a man wearing a blue bow tie and a brown goatee. A metal name tag on his white shirt said JOHN COATES.

  “I need clearance to—” Everon began.

  “I’m sorry,” Coates interrupted, “no one is allowed to leave the ground. An FAA director was here fifteen minutes ago. She grounded all flights. The military’s about to take over. Besides, our radios are out.”

  Everon studied the man in the white shirt. “All flights?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Everything except military and EMS.”

  “My sister’s in there somewhere,” he pointed to the distant flames. “I have a helicopter. You expect us to just sit here on the ground?”

  “Afraid so,” the man told him and began to pull the door closed.

  Everon persisted, not realizing he was holding onto the door. “That’s it?”

  “Absolutely it! . . . ” he said more strongly, “Sorry!” forcing the door out of Everon’s hand.

  “I-have-a-spare-radio-I-can-let-you-have!” Everon spat into the closing crack.

  The door hesitated. It opened. “That would be a help.”

  Two minutes later Everon was back from the jet with a black hand-held the size of a walkie-talkie.

  “Thanks!” the controller said, widening the crack he’d been peering through. “Really appreciate it! At least we’ll be able to communicate with the EMS flights now, talk in other pilots trying to figure out how to get in here. We’ve had six crashes in the area already . . . ”

  The blue lights along the runway’s sides were glowing even more faintly than when they’d landed.

  “Thanks!” He began to pull the door closed again.