(Wrath-06)-Smoke & Dust (2012)

by Chris Stewart

“You really think so?” Bono asked him.

  The driver hesitated. “Of course I do.”

  “I think you’re kidding yourself,” Bono answered. “I think you know we’re in deep do-do here. I think you know we’re going to have to find our own way out. You just haven’t quite come to grips with that yet. But think about it, sir. No communications with anyone upstairs. No power of any kind anywhere on the grid. Your entire system shut down. This isn’t a matter of changing a circuit breaker and getting back on our way.”

  The engineer grunted but didn’t say anything.

  “How far to the station?” Sam asked again.

  The driver thought, then answered slowly. “Three miles. Maybe a little more. Hope I don’t run you over as I go speeding by.”

  “We do, too. Now good luck to you, sir.”

  The soldiers turned, tightened the chest straps on their backpacks, and started running. Sam held the single light and they stayed close together, sharing the narrow beam as they ran.

  Their breathing was heavy but evenly paced as they settled into stride. Sam checked his watch, estimating the time until they emerged at the station.

  FOUR

  Interstate 65, Fourteen Miles Southeast of Chicago

  Sara moved through the deep darkness toward the black woman and put her arm around her shoulders. The silver beads at the tips of her tightly braided hair glistened in the moonlight. Ammon and Luke stood back. “My name is Sara Brighton,” Sara said, holding the woman’s arm. “Can you tell me who you are?”

  The black woman stiffened under Sara’s touch, glanced toward her quickly, but kept her head low. Her guard instinctively up, she took a suspicious step back, aware of Sara’s pale skin shining in the dim light. The black woman’s mother, a good Christian woman, had taught her from the time she was old enough to walk that all were God’s children and she had no room to judge. But a lifetime of hard conditioning and bad experiences had also taught her to be careful when it came to people not of her race.

  Then she thought of her sick daughter, and her fear of the strangers was quickly swallowed up. “My name is Mary Dupree,” she answered softly.

  Ammon stepped forward and shook hands, introducing himself with a smile, feeling the weak tremble in Mary’s fingers. Luke waved a hello.

  Mary studied them: Luke in his baggy shorts, sandals, and T-shirt; Ammon in Levi’s, hiking boots, and dark jacket. Nice-looking boys, she thought, but not city kids, that was certain.

  “I was down in Columbus,” Mary explained as she turned back to Sara. “I have a little girl. She’s very sick.”

  “Sick? You mean like with the flu or something?”

  “No, ma’am.” Mary stopped and cleared her throat. “I wish that’s all it was. You don’t know what I would give—” Her voice was very quiet now. “No, ma’am,” she repeated, straightening her back, “my baby’s suffering with cancer. We were down at a special clinic for her last treatment, but the doctors wouldn’t even do it. They said that it was too—” She stopped once again, looking off. “Too late,” she concluded.

  Sara listened, understanding, her mouth hanging open in shock. Ammon turned to Luke and gritted his teeth in sympathy, unsure of what to say.

  “Where’s your daughter now?” Sara asked.

  Mary pointed behind her. “Back in my car.”

  “And your husband? Is he with you?”

  “My husband passed away ten years ago last Tuesday.”

  Sara noted Mary’s immediate remembrance of the date. She now knew from experience what that meant. “I’m sorry,” she answered quickly before turning to Ammon and Luke. “Guys, we need to help Mrs. Dupree, don’t you think?”

  Luke shot an uncomfortable look at Ammon and hesitated before answering, “Of course, Mom.”

  “Let’s go check on her daughter. That’s the first thing we need to do.”

  “Cool, Mom. For sure.” He turned to Ammon. “I’ll get a flashlight.”

  “I doubt it will work now,” Ammon said.

  “Why’s that?”

  Ammon glanced toward the timid-looking woman at his side. “Later,” he whispered.

  Luke hesitated, still not understanding. “Won’t hurt to try,” he said as he moved around the car and reached into the backseat. Working his way in the dark, he found a flashlight and pulled it out. He pressed the switch and got nothing.

  “Come on,” Ammon said.

  Luke flipped the switch again and again, and then unscrewed the light bulb end of the flashlight.

  “Come on,” Ammon repeated and started walking.

  The four adults moved through the night, walking slowly, their hands reaching out in front of them as they walked toward Mary’s car.

  * * *

  Later, they stood in conference outside the car. The moon, bloody and red, had climbed toward its zenith and the wind was picking up. Enough time had passed that their eyes had adjusted to the dark and what before had been only darkness was revealed now in shadows of gray and black.

  “All right, what we going to do?” Luke asked. He spoke softly, afraid of waking the little girl who was sleeping in the backseat of the car. Sara looked through the window, a worried expression on her face. The child should have been in an ambulance. It was ridiculous that, weak and sick as she was, she had been transported by private car. Sara raged at the sight of the fragile child hunched against the backseat, her knees pulled up to her chest, her shoulders trembling weakly from the cold. Mary had placed a small sweater over her, but that was all she had.

  “She’s a beautiful little girl,” Sara said as she looked at the child.

  “She’s an angel,” Mary answered. “You just don’t know what kind of girl she really is.”

  Sara nodded to her sons. “My kids are hardly babies, Mary, but I think I understand how you feel about your daughter.”

  Mary looked at the young men standing beside their mother. “They look like good boys,” she said.

  Sara opened the back door and reached in, tucking the small sweater more closely around the little girl’s shoulders. “What’s her name?” she asked.

  “Kelly Beth.”

  Sara stood and turned to Luke. “How cold is it right now, do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Mom, somewhere in the fifties, I would guess.”

  “How cold’s it going to get tonight?”

  “Colder. Not too bad, but it won’t be comfortable.”

  Sara turned to Mary. “Do you have anything with you, blankets or whatever?”

  Mary shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It isn’t even my car. I had to borrow it from a friend to get down here. My car is such a beater, I didn’t think it would make it. I brought that sweater, but I wasn’t planning on . . . you know . . . I wasn’t thinking we would have to . . . .”

  “I understand,” Sara said, placing her hand on Mary’s arm. “Don’t worry, Mary, we’ll work this out.”

  Ammon moved toward her. “Have you got the key?”

  “It’s in the ignition,” Mary told him. Ammon walked around the side of the car, opened the door, and reached in. He turned the key, getting nothing. He pulled it out and moved around to the trunk. Feeling for the keyhole with his fingers, he inserted the key and turned it, and the trunk lid popped open. Luke pushed it up. They peered in for a moment, but were unable to see anything in the dark. Ammon reached in and felt around, announcing what he touched, “An old tire. What’s this? Feels like a wheelchair. Lots of dirt. A rusted jack, I think. Couple empty grocery sacks. A little garbage.” He stood. “I think that’s it.”

  “Nothing we can use?” Sara pressed him.

  Luke pushed the trunk closed. “I don’t think so, Mom.”

  Sara thought. “OK,” she said. “What does everyone think?” Her two sons huddled close around her. Mary stood apart, but Sara turned to draw her in. “Mary?” she asked.

  Mary hesitated, unsure. She didn’t feel like she belonged inside the circle of the family; that was obvious
from the uncomfortable expression on her face.

  “Mary, listen to me, OK?” Sara said as the small woman held back. “I don’t know what’s going on here. We’re just like you—we were driving down the road when the same thing happened to our car. I think that Ammon,” she nodded toward her son, “has an idea what has happened, but he hasn’t even had time to explain it to us yet. We’ll get to that soon enough. But I want you to know that, no matter what has happened or what’s going to happen after this, we will not leave you alone here. You understand that? We’re not going to leave you alone. We’re not going to leave Kelly Beth. We’re going to stay with you, take you with us—whatever we do, we can stay together as long as you need. I mean that, Mary. We’re not the kind of people who would just leave you and Kelly Beth out here by yourselves.”

  Mary stood in the dim moonlight, her face tight, almost stunned. “Do you really mean that?” she asked.

  “I really do.”

  “You don’t even know me. You don’t know Kelly. Why would you even care?”

  Sara shrugged.

  Luke patted the dead flashlight against the palm of his hand. “My mom’s the kind of person who’s been dragging lost puppies home all her life.” He shrugged. “She’s just a good person.”

  Mary lightened, her face relaxing just a bit. “You a churchgoing family?” she wondered.

  “Every week,” Luke smiled. “Rain or shine. Super Bowl, hurricanes, typhoid fever, whatever, Mom’s got us there.”

  “You are . . . ?”

  “We are Christians, Mary,” Sara answered. “That’s all that matters. We believe in and follow Christ.”

  Mary hugged her arms around herself and lifted her eyes toward the stars. “Thank you, Goodly Father,” she said out loud. “Thanks for sending these people here to help me. Thanks for not leaving me and Kelly Beth alone.”

  Sara waited a moment, then turned to Ammon. “Tell us about the EMP,” she said.

  He hesitated. “I don’t know that much.”

  “Then just tell us what you can.”

  Ammon shifted from one foot to the other. It was getting late and colder now. As they stood, they heard occasional voices up and down the freeway and saw, or really sensed, faint gray movement against the starlight. Luke kept turning toward the shouting voices, but no one came their way.

  Ammon cleared his throat. “OK, it’s called an EMP. Electromagnetic pulse. It’s caused when a nuclear warhead is detonated high in the air, almost out in space, I think. Dad and I talked about it a couple of times. Then I read a little about it. I could tell it was one of the few things that really scared him, so I wanted to know. There’s tons of information on the internet, but I don’t remember all that much. I do remember Dad telling me he thought it was the most likely and most deadly thing that could happen to the United States. Remember last winter when we were skiing up in Vermont, that one night he and I stayed up and talked, looking at the Northern Lights? He told me then that he thought an EMP could kill half of the people in the United States.”

  “Half?” Luke answered. “Come on, dude. Really? Half!?”

  Ammon shrugged his shoulders. “I’m pretty sure that’s what he said.”

  “Are you saying that half of all Americans are dead right now? I mean, what happened to us? Why didn’t any of us die?”

  “No, no,” Ammon answered. “That’s not how it works. The nuke goes off in space, really high up there, somewhere over the country. It sends out a powerful force of electrons or protons or magic stuff, I don’t know, all I know is the electromagnetic pulse reaches down to earth and fries all the electrical circuits in everything we have, from toasters to computers to electrical cables, cars,” he nodded to the dead flashlight in Luke’s hand, “pretty much everything is gone.”

  “But it doesn’t kill anyone? That seems kind of pointless as a weapon, then.”

  “No, dude, think! If that’s what really happened, then we just got sent back to the preindustrial world. Look at us! Is there any better illustration? We’re stuck out here on the freeway. Our cars won’t work. We’ve got no cell phones, no radios. What are we going to eat—I know, I know, we’ve got a little with us, but enough to get us through the winter? I don’t think so. Where we going to go? How we going to get there? Water? Sanitation? At least the pioneers had cows, horses, oxen and stuff. We’ve got nothing, Luke, nothing but what we stuffed in our car. What if this has happened all over the country? Can you see it? You get the picture? How are we, how is America, going to even feed itself?”

  Luke swallowed. “No kidding.” He was whispering now.

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  Sara put her hand to her mouth. “Is it really that bad, Ammon?”

  Ammon shook his head, his blond hair catching the moonlight. Standing beside Sara, he towered over her. “I don’t know, Mom, but it kind of looks that way.”

  Mary’s face hadn’t changed. She simply didn’t understand. EMPs? Electrical circuits? It made no sense at all to her.

  “What are we going to do, then?” Sara asked.

  Ammon looked around. “We’ve got to change our thinking, and we’ve got to change it right away. This isn’t a matter of trying to figure out how to make it through the night. It isn’t going to be any better in the morning. No one’s going to send out the cavalry to help us. We need to plan. We need to think. And we have to realize that we might have to get through this alone.”

  Sara walked two steps away and peered into the darkness before turning back. “But it might not be that bad, right? I mean, we don’t know for sure it was an EMP. We don’t know for certain. It could have been something else. It might be something as simple as—”

  “What, Mom? What else could it be? The entire countryside is dark.” He gestured toward the glowing lights of Chicago that were no longer there. “Our car, our cell phones, our flashlights. Every car around us—”

  “No, Ammon, I’m just not ready to believe that we are completely alone in this. Help will come. There might be other parts of the country that weren’t hit. There are other countries, other nations—”

  “Help is months away, Mom. Weeks away, at the very earliest. Consider what we’re asking! It’s an impossible task. How do you feed more than three hundred million people? How do you get them water? How do you even keep them warm? And the truth is that real help might not ever come.

  “Think about it, Mom. Think about Hurricane Katrina. That was one city that was hit, a couple hundred thousand people. The rest of the nation was unaffected except for some other areas along the Gulf Coast. The federal government was functioning—it hadn’t just been hit by a nuke over Washington, D.C. Yet look what happened down there. It took days to get even the most basic things, days to provide food and water. Months to bring back power. Years to clean up the mess. That was one city, Mom, helped by the whole rest of the nation, yet look how long it took.

  “Reverse that now. We’ve got no national government left to speak of, no state or local people who are going to be able to help. They’re stranded just like we are.

  “So let’s say that maybe part of the nation wasn’t hit. Let’s suppose help is coming, and suppose that by some miracle it could get here in a few weeks—which I honestly, no kidding, really doubt is going to happen, but let’s say that it does. That still leaves, what, a third of the country, a hundred million people, fending for themselves for three or four weeks. Winter is coming on. It’s already getting cold at night. No food. No water. No doctors or hospitals. People are, you know, kind of getting weird already after the bomb in D.C. This isn’t going to help that. It will be a crazy four weeks.”

  Sara squared her shoulders. “No, Ammon, it can’t be. I just don’t believe it’s going to all come crashing down.”

  “Mom, I love you, you know that, and I respect you more than any living person in this world. I love your optimism and faith, the way you carry us and make us press on. But this isn’t something that’s just going to go away. This isn’t something
we’re going to be delivered from. We have to get through this, not around it. We’ll get through this—and we will—but the only way to do it is if we’re careful and we think.”

  The small group was silent, the four of them lost in thought. “OK, then,” Luke finally said. “What’s the first thing we do?”

  Ammon bit his lip and turned to his twin brother. “First thing, we stay together. Second thing, we protect our stuff.” He gestured down the off-ramp toward their car, a hundred yards away. “The equipment in our car is our only lifeline. It’s everything we have, but it might be enough to see us through.”

  No one answered.

  “OK,” Ammon pressed them. “Everyone cool with that so far?”

  “Yeah, sounds good,” Luke replied.

  Mary moved toward Ammon, her voice apologetic. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I simply can’t stay here. I’ve got to get my daughter home. I’ve got to get her medications.”

  “I understand,” Ammon said. “But we can’t do anything until morning. The last thing we want to do is to go wandering off into the night. Let’s push your car onto the shoulder—maybe someone will come along—then split up our blankets and our sleeping bags.” He turned to Luke. “You and Mom sleep in our Honda. I’ll stay here with Mrs. Dupree.”

  Mary hesitated. “But tomorrow, I’ll be home, right? We’ll go to my apartment in the city. It isn’t very far. Someone is waiting for me there. She won’t understand what’s going on. She’s only been here in the country for a few days—”

  They heard the sudden crash of breaking glass coming from behind them, farther down the road. The sound was harsh and jarring against the silence of the night.

  They stopped talking. No one moved.

  Shouting. Cries of laughter. Another crash. The sound of shattering glass.

  They turned toward the crashing.

  “That’s our car!” Ammon breathed. “Someone’s breaking in!”

  Sara’s hands shot to her mouth, her mind racing. All their food! All that money! Their water! Their clothes and sleeping bags! She gasped and took a step back. What if they had a gun? What if they found the gun hidden under the front seat of the car? “Oh no!” she mumbled in horror.