Rise the Dark

by Michael Koryta

  I will contact you all when I feel it is safe. I have no idea when that will be. If you don’t hear from me again, you can guess what happened.

  PREPARE FOR THE WORST!!!

  She hated exclamation marks but thought they served a critical purpose here. The message had a certain tripping rhythm, a stumbling hysteria, and she knew it would be effective. She’d met most of the men in these groups over her nine months with Doug, and they were almost always wild-eyed with burgeoning panic and twisting theories, even on a calm day. After this message, there would certainly be a blood-pressure spike. And then the grid would go down in the West, and they would remember the message, the vague warning of something big coming, and of government lies. From there…

  Time would tell.

  And she was running out of it if she wanted to join Eli by dusk.

  55

  Twenty-nine miles outside of Chill River, Eli Pate told Jay to turn off the highway.

  They were in a basin, with mountains in the rearview mirror and empty big-sky country ahead. Foothills snaked up to the east, Jay saw out his window. Power lines traced the low points, carefully laid in the places of easiest access, even if that was a bit of a joke—there was no easy access to the lines in Montana in the wrong kind of weather, and when you needed to get to them, it was usually the wrong kind of weather.

  “We wait here?” Jay said. It was a desolate spot but they were far from the lines and he could see no purpose for this location other than its isolation.

  “No, no. I want you to watch something.”

  Pate reached into the backpack that rested between his feet and brought out a pair of binoculars. Zeiss, high-end. He lifted them to his eyes with one hand, the other still on the gun, finger still on the trigger. Jay followed the angle of the binoculars. There was a road far to the northeast, nearly out of sight to the naked eye. Beyond that, the countryside was empty. There was nothing to see, and yet Pate said, “Tremendous,” and lowered the binoculars and passed them to Jay. “All yours, my friend. The show belongs to you.”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “I’d recommend you watch the access road directly in front of you.”

  Jay lifted the binoculars and adjusted the focus. He finally found a single fir, neatly cut, leaning on the power lines at a forty-five-degree angle. It was just as they’d had in the Beartooths on the day all this had started, only down here there was no blizzard to contend with.

  Jay thought, It will take the boys all of ten minutes to clear that shit.

  “Cute work,” he said.

  “Keep watching,” Pate said.

  Jay kept watching. Nothing happened. His hands and eyes tired from the effort and he was about to ask just what in the hell he was supposed to see when dust appeared to the west. An oncoming vehicle. A few seconds later, it was close enough for him to identify: a bucket truck.

  He’ll lose his good humor when he sees them at work, Jay thought. They’ll have it fixed in less time than it took him to cut the tree down.

  The truck lumbered on down the road, the cloud of dust gathering in its wake like a storm. There was a dip where the road met a small runoff stream, but the water was low and there was a grate to make vehicle crossings easier. The truck would be able to get close to the tree, and the crew would make fast work of it.

  He was about to say as much when the truck’s front wheels made contact with the grate, and then it exploded.

  Jay didn’t immediately understand what had transpired. One instant the truck had been rumbling along and the next it was a mangled mess of broken metal and glass, and the cattle guard itself seemed to be inside out.

  “What did you do!” Jay shouted, and Eli Pate laughed, low and soft and extremely pleased.

  “I should have kept the glasses. You got all the fun. A good show, it seems?”

  Jay had actually moved the binoculars away, but now he lifted them again and, in horror, panned the landscape until he located the truck.

  “You planted a bomb for them,” he said. His voice was hollow. All of him was.

  “Not at all. Take a closer look, Jay. That is simple technology at its finest. Trapped energy. That is all we did. We coiled the energy that the world is filled with, and we let it speak for itself.”

  Through the lens, Jay could see what was left of the truck—the front and back ends were intact but it was crushed in the middle as if pinched between a giant’s thumb and index finger. One man struggled to crawl out of the passenger window. His blood ran down the remnants of the door panel and joined a pool of steaming fluids dripping out of the engine. He was fighting past something that at first appeared to be a part of the wreckage, but then Jay saw that it wasn’t a piece of the truck but rather the steep, angled sides of the grate. They had snapped shut on the truck like a wolf’s jaws.

  “Why?” Jay said. “For the love of God, what is the point of this?”

  “Not the love of God, Jay. The absence of one. Absence of both love and God, actually. I hate to shatter any illusions you might have previously held, but the world you occupy is a cold one, and no one listens. No one cares.”

  He sounded restful, an old man on a porch chair, close to dozing off.

  “You had questioned the thoroughness of my approach. You don’t need to tell me that; I’ve seen it on your face from the start. So let’s discuss it now. I’d appreciate your review. Your beloved bride will certainly appreciate your review. Understand?”

  Jay held the binoculars half raised, staring at the carnage in the distance. Without the zoom, it looked like nothing more than a dust cloud.

  “Within the next few hours,” Eli Pate said, “a number of utility trucks are going to meet with problems in very desolate locations. I expect that will create a strain on manpower, not to mention equipment. But your kind is used to crisis. They will respond. While they deal with these problems, my own crews will reassemble elsewhere. They’re equipped with grid maps and a fine understanding of the most remote areas on the system. They could continue to cut trees and create faults, of course, but that is so frivolous, child’s play. What they will do instead is wait for you. Because when you take down the transmission lines from Chill River, what will happen?”

  “A massive outage,” Jay said. His voice sounded disembodied.

  “Exactly. And think about all the lines out there that will suddenly be dead, harmless. Now imagine what fast work one could make with chain saws on the actual utility poles themselves. Without any risk from the current, I think they can bring down many lines in a hurry. And my understanding is that your sophisticated computer monitors won’t know where this is happening, because the system monitors depend on the current to identify the problems. But there will be no current, and therefore they will be blind. Am I correct so far?”

  He was correct. He was also brilliant. Taking the transmission lines out would cause a massive problem, but it would be temporary. If he had teams working with chain saws in the mountains, though, taking down line after line, and then transmission was reenergized with no idea of all the faults that awaited…Jay could picture the grid map on his office wall, and he thought, Good night, Seattle. Good night, Portland.

  “I’m no fool,” Eli Pate said. “I know that they’ll send for help and that they’ll get those transmission lines back up. But with all those unknown faults scattered about the mountains, what will happen when they reenergize the transmission lines, Jay?”

  “The system will try to shift loads. Frantically. And by doing that, it will create more problems. Cascading outages. You’ll lose cities. You’ll lose states, maybe.”

  He sounded like a man beneath an interrogation lamp, admitting what he didn’t want to admit.

  “That,” Eli Pate said, “was always my idea. And I’m going to share a little secret, Jay. This is only the start. But I’ll be true to my word. If you take out those transmission lines, you will live to see your wife again. That doesn’t bother me in the least. In fact, I rather look forward to the medi
a broadcasts of your account of your time with me. It will be fun to watch. Except…” He snapped his fingers. “Damn. It will be awfully hard to find a functioning television in this part of the country. Alas, the price of success.”

  Jay lifted the binoculars to his eyes again and saw the man who’d climbed free was looking back inside the truck, trying to help the others. Another survivor reached for help from inside the ruins of the truck, reached for the man who’d already escaped.

  The bloody arm he extended no longer had a hand.

  56

  The route Larry took away from the corpse of Scott Shields led them back through and toward the Bighorn Mountains.

  “Fastest way would be up and over,” he said, “but the pass is still closed with snow at the top. We gotta head south, go through Greybull. The property is private land that abuts the national forest. It’s basically cut off from everywhere in the winter and not much easier to access in the summer. You could develop it, I suppose, but it’s expensive to build out there. I can’t even imagine a figure on utilities. Just to run electric would be plenty of work, and plenty of dollars. But it was good empty land. You know I’ve always liked good empty land.”

  He was too chatty, considering what they’d come from and where they were bound, but Mark understood it, remembered it. Larry had always talked more when he didn’t want to dwell on reality.

  “I’m sorry,” Mark said.

  “What?” Larry looked genuinely confused.

  “I’m sorry that I showed up on your doorstep this morning. Why are you even doing this? You’ve committed enough crimes today to put yourself in lockup for a long while, Uncle. Why?”

  Larry frowned, glanced at him. “You said they murdered your wife, Markus.”

  “You didn’t even know her.”

  “You’re still family.”

  “Not the kind who has been any help to you.”

  Larry’s eyes were back on the road. “That’s not how I look at it, son. You were brought up wrong. I had a part in that, I know.”

  “You had the good part. You tried to balance Mom.”

  “Hell, I didn’t provide any balance. We were just different kinds of messes, my sister and me. Our brother too. Ronny and Violet and me, well, we stuck together better than most, I suppose, but I don’t think we would have if it hadn’t been for you. What you needed, none of us knew how to give. But we got something from trying. You’ll never understand that.” He gave a bitter bark of a laugh. “You know I look back on when you were nothing but a baby, back before you could so much as stand without help, and I think that’s why I got clean. Because you needed me. Needed us. But my definition of clean would be most men’s filthy. All the same…I think I got closer than I would have been because of you, Markus. Maybe even stayed alive because of you. I was in a bad way when your mother had you, and when Isaac skipped, what I wanted to do was kill the son of a bitch, but that wasn’t an option. Why? Because you needed your ass wiped. And so I stayed and tried to help. And trying to help was good for me.”

  Mark said, “Isaac?”

  “Shit. It’s been so damn long, I guess I slipped,” Larry said. He was casual, as if giving a name to an unknown father were a small thing. “He might not even have been the boy. I hate to put it that blunt for you, but that’s the way it was. He was the most likely candidate, I guess you’d say. He was leading the polls.”

  “You knew him.”

  “Mostly what I knew was that he’d skipped out when he knew your mother was…well, in her condition.”

  “Pregnant,” Mark said. “That was her condition. He knew it when he left?”

  Larry’s face twisted. “Shit, son, I don’t rightly recall how it went or how it didn’t. I’m not saying you didn’t get shortchanged by not having a father around, but you didn’t lose anything by missing out on that guy. He was the type who attracted your mother, full of bullshit tales that she wanted to believe.”

  “What kind of tales?”

  “He was a psychic,” Larry said with mock seriousness. He looked at Mark for camaraderie in the ridicule, but Mark was thinking of the boy from Cassadaga telling him he belonged in the camp, and the best he could manage was a wry smile.

  “For a psychic,” Larry said, “he sure was surprised by that pregnancy test.”

  Mark exhaled and turned toward the open window so the wind blew harder into his face, making him squint.

  Larry glanced at him and said, “I don’t mean to go on about that. None of it matters. Not him, not even your mother. You got out from under it, from under all of us, and you did damn well for yourself. I’m proud to know it.”

  Mark thought of his condo the way it had once looked, bright and shining, thought of Lauren and her new Infiniti and her law-school degree, and he thought of his own job. He had done well for himself. That was not a lie. And yet, by the end of today, he might be handcuffed beside a stolen truck and headed to a remote jail in the Rockies.

  “You said it right earlier, Uncle.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Every man has a different definition of clean,” Mark said. “And I’ve found it’s tough to hold your anchor on that one. Even when you think you’ve got it…there’s something you haven’t counted on blowing toward you in the wind. Always. And when it gets there? Well, you might find your position sliding then. You might find it sliding fast.”

  Larry didn’t answer. For several miles neither of them spoke. They passed through Greybull and headed east, chasing those mountains, which grew larger and taller and starker with each passing mile.

  “I’m sorry that wind blew you back here,” Larry said finally. “But we’ll find the son of a bitch you need, and we’ll get him to answer for your wife’s murder.”

  “Sure we will.”

  “She was something special, wasn’t she?” Larry said. “I can feel it. Hell, I just know that. From the way you…I just know it, that’s all.”

  “Yes,” Mark said, rubbing the old dive permit between his thumb and index finger. “She was something special.”

  The engine’s throaty growl labored, rising to a whine as the road steepened on its climb into the mountains, and Mark found that it was hard for him to hold Lauren’s face in his mind. She seemed very far away.

  57

  The place Pate led him to was down a dirt lane through rugged prairie land, fifteen miles away from the nearest town and twenty from the Chill River power plant.

  It was, unfortunately, the perfect choice. The transmission lines were equipped with motion-activated cameras in the ranges close to the power plant and the substations, but this stretch in the middle distance was a floater—the kind of stretch that was far too common in the country. Critical infrastructure, absolutely, but monitored? Not exactly.

  “Before we get out of the truck,” Pate said, “let’s take a bird’s-eye view of the area, shall we? What do you see, Jay?”

  What Jay saw was simple—a cut between mountains that provided access for all things human, all things that the natural countryside rejected. Cars, trains, electricity.

  “Speak,” Pate said.

  “I see transmission lines. And mountains.” The mountains were so massive that they threw off distance assessment. They seemed much closer than they were.

  “Come on, Jay. You’ve got to see more than that.”

  “Prairie. Trees. Train tracks.”

  “Have you heard of Jason Woodring?” Pate asked.

  Jay shook his head.

  “He’s in prison now. A lone wolf, and an unsuccessful one. But what he did was quite fascinating. He looked at the intrusions on the land and decided to use one to help destroy the other.”

  Jay saw it then and was surprised he hadn’t recognized it earlier—the human path west had been hard earned, ripped from rugged lands, and the various stages of progress followed the same path. First the rock had been removed for train tracks, then roads had been paved. Then power lines erected. Then cell towers. In inhospitable country, everyone trie
d to make use of the same access points.

  “You want to use a train,” he said.

  Pate laughed. “Very good! But I don’t want to use just any train. I want to use a coal train. The very one that feeds the plant that feeds those lines. I doubt anyone will appreciate the wit in that, but, nevertheless, I try.”

  He leaned forward, holding the gun in his left hand while he pointed with his right.

  “There are four reels of aircraft cable hidden in those trees. Stainless-steel cable that will hold at least ten thousand pounds, and there’s several hundred feet of it. Anchor rings are bored into the trunks. The cables need to run from those anchor points up to the towers. They can’t make contact with the tracks themselves; that will trigger an alarm. You will secure them to the towers. Do you follow?”

  Jay did. He also knew it wouldn’t work. Pate had underestimated the strength of the towers. They would not come down. The cables would snap long before the towers moved.

  Pate said, “Now I’m going to make a confession, Jay. These cables were a contingency, not the prime option. Your original task was to climb up there and install plastic explosives on the insulators. The towers never needed to come down. It was, if I do say so myself, a far superior vision, more sophisticated. But not all things today have gone according to plan. You know how that feels, don’t you? The way you can open the door and find unanticipated trouble? That’s where I am. So we come to the contingency, and to a critical juncture for your bride. This approach with the cables is not one in which I have a high degree of confidence, but for Sabrina to see tomorrow’s sunrise, it will need to work.”

  “No,” Jay said. “No, that’s not fair, because it won’t work. I can’t fix that.”