One Second After

by William R. Forstchen

John breathed a sigh of relief. At the moment he’d have emptied his wallet for one pack, but now he could take them without feeling guilty.

  “Thanks, Hamid.”

  John took the cartons and looked around the store. Nearly all the beer was gone, most of the soda as well. Munchies, chips, pork rinds, all gone. Hamid laughed.

  “Best night of business I’ve ever done. Must have a couple thousand in cash here.”

  “Hamid, do yourself a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Take down the rest of your cigarettes and stash them.”

  “Why?”

  “Just call it an investment, a hedge on inflation.”

  Hamid shook his head. “Can’t do that. Maybe for strangers from the highway, but my friends here?”

  John smiled.

  “Just a friendly suggestion, Hamid. Stash them away; from now on, if you want to sell them to friends, do so just one pack at a time.”

  Leaving Hamid, who as soon as John was out the door began to pull the cartons off the display rack, he drove another block to the center of town, again weaving around the stalled cars, and turned up Montreat Road, usually the route of his daily commute to the college. The fire station and police station were on his right and there was a moderate-size crowd there, all looking in his direction. He pulled in, got out of his car, this time locking it and pocketing the keys.

  “Hey, John, how the hell did you get that old beast rolling?”

  It was Charlie Fuller, the town’s director of public safety, which made him head of both the fire department and the police department. He was also a long-standing member of their Civil War Roundtable and often John’s chief antagonist when it came to debates about the Constitutional justice of the Southern cause.

  John looked around at the open parking area. All the fire engines were hangared inside the building along with the ambulance.

  “Anything moving here?” he asked.

  Charlie shook his head.

  “Nothing. It’s been a difficult night.”

  “How so?”

  “Somewhere around a dozen dead, for starters.”

  “What?”

  “Heart attacks mostly. One overweight out-of-shape guy walked in from the highway and collapsed right here, right where we’re standing. I have no ambulance, nothing. We got Doc Kellor over, but the guy was already gone.”

  Charlie hesitated.

  “Three dead up at the nursing home. Tyler’s ok, though,” he added quickly. “At least last I heard.

  “Folks have been walking in, or riding bikes in, reports of accidents, and that fire up on Craggy.”

  “Yeah, I saw it.”

  “Someone said it was a plane, a large one, going in.” John didn’t say anything.

  “John, all my communication links are down. Everything, landline phone, radio. I have not heard a word from Asheville and I’m in the dark.”

  “What I figured.”

  There was the sound of a rattling engine, a sound he could instantly recognize, and around the corner an old Volkswagen van appeared, driven by Jim Bartlett, John’s neighbor from down the street.

  Jim pulled up by John’s Edsel and got out. The sight of Jim always cracked John up; it was as if he had stepped out of a time machine from 1970, raggedy jeans, collarless shirt, headband like the kind Willie Nelson used to wear, the only giveaway of time passage the fact that Jim’s chest-length beard and short-length hair were nearly all gray.

  * * *

  “Hey guys, what’s happening?” Jim asked with a bit of a sardonic smile.

  “So your old VWs are still running,” Charlie replied.

  Jim smiled. “Even if the world is coming to an end my man, they’ll keep on rolling right up until the final big boom.”

  “Well,” Charlie said quietly, voice pitched low so others wouldn’t hear, “I’d prefer you not going around saying it’s the end of the world.”

  “But it is,” Jim replied, still smiling. “Been saying it for years. The Mayan Prophecy. They were saying December 2012, but somebody obviously got the date wrong.

  He raised his voice a bit.

  “This is it, my friends. The Day of Doom, just like them Mayans predicted.”

  John looked around, half a dozen small groups were gathered outside the station, and as Jim spoke people started to turn and look towards him.

  “Been telling you all for years that this day was coming,” Jim announced, strangely he was still smiling. “The Mayans had it right.”

  “My kid told me about that last night,” someone replied, “yeah, some sci-fi guy wrote a book about it, my boy gave me the book and it seemed on the mark with all of this. Jim’s right, this could be it.”

  John had always liked Jim, in almost every way he was a level handed, gentle soul, but he did harbor a few eccentric ideas, and now he had an audience.

  “Power going off is just the starter. Wait until you see what happens to the sun.”

  “Damn it, Jim,” Charlie hissed, “come over here.”

  Charlie forcefully put a hand on Jim’s shoulder, moving him closer to the firehouse, John following.

  “Are you crazy?” Charlie whispered hoarsely. “You want to start a panic?

  Jim looked at him confused.

  “I should haul your butt inside right now for inciting panic.”

  “Just a minute,” John interjected, putting his hand on Charlie’s and pulling it off Jim’s shoulder.

  “Jim, maybe you’re right,” John said hurriedly. “But there are lot of kids standing around. You want to scare the crap out of them at a time like this? Come on, my friend, chill out, let parents tell their kids in their own way. Please.”

  Jim nodded thoughtfully.

  “Sorry bro, didn’t mean to scare anyone.”

  John made eye contact with Charlie. If his friend tried to collar Jim and make a scene, it just might very well start the panic rolling. Charlie got the message.

  “Ok, sorry, Jim. Just I don’t want the kids getting frightened any more than they already are. So do us all a favor, and don’t talk about this Mayan stuff for right now. Got it.”

  “Sure, my man, got it.”

  “Now just go around and tell people you were joking, calm them down,” John interjected, “it’d help a lot.”

  “Got it.”

  Jim made a show of turning back to face those who had been watching them.

  “Just having some fun, that’s all,” Jim announced. “Some fun,” came a bitter reply. “We want to know what the hell is going on.”

  “That’s what we’re working on right now,” Charlie announced, so just stay calm.”

  “You two, we gotta talk.” Coming out of the station was Tom Barker, the chief of police.

  “Shit,” Jim muttered. “Here comes the man.”

  “Tom, how you doing?” John said quietly.

  “Like a legless dog that’s covered in fleas and can’t scratch,” Tom replied, and John smiled a bit at yet another of Tom’s colorful southernisms.

  “Charlie, a question for you,” John said. “Absolutely no communication whatsoever and all vehicles dead except for my car and Jim’s here?”

  “Yeah, that’s about it. Also the old Jeep down at Butler’s Garage still runs, though. We’ve got a couple of older mopeds and motorcycles, and Maury Hurt’s antique World War Two jeep. We’ve got that out on the highway now, checking on some emergency cases that people reported.”

  “Not good,” John said softly.

  “I think we’re on the same wavelength,” Charlie replied softly. “Where’s Orville Gardner?”

  John knew that Orville worked downtown in Asheville, as assistant director for the county’s emergency preparedness office. “Not a word from him. Guess he’s stuck in Asheville.”

  “Tom, Charlie, can we go inside and talk?”

  “Why?” Tom asked. “I’d like to know why you two have cars and the rest of us don’t.”

  “Because nothing can kill a Volkswagen, man,” Ji
m said with a grin. John stepped between Jim and Tom.

  “I really think we should go inside, gentlemen,” John said. Though most of his career in the military had been spent behind books or up front in a classroom, he had led troops in the field and still did remember a bit about command voice, and he used it now.

  Tom bristled slightly, but Charlie smiled.

  “Sure, let’s go. The mayor’s inside; let’s go to her office.”

  The three went in, Jim trailing along, and though John hated to insult the man, he turned and looked at him with a smile.

  “Hey, look. You know you’re a hair up Tom’s butt.”

  Jim smiled.

  “He’s out in my back lot every year prowling for weed and never caught me once.”

  “Maybe you should skip this meeting. Keep an eye on the cars. Help keep people calm and no more of this stuff about prophecies. Ok?”

  “Sure, my man,” and Jim gave him a friendly salute.

  John walked into Mayor Kate Lindsey’s office and she looked up from behind her desk, bleary-eyed. They were old friends. Kate and Mary had grown up together.

  “You look beat, Kate.”

  “I am. Never should have run for a third term. Damn thankless job at the best of times, and now this. Did Tom tell you that someone came down from the nursing home? They’ve got three dead up there.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  “One of them was the Wilson boy.”

  John sighed and shook his head. The boy had been a freshman at the college. Car accident three years ago, the usual story, a drunk who walked away from it, had left the boy in a vegetative state, kept alive by a respirator, his parents clinging to hope.… Well, that was finished.

  “I thought the law required all nursing homes to have emergency generation. Those folks up there are going to be facing one helluva lawsuit,” Kate snapped.

  “What about the highway?” John asked. “Any problems there? I had a bit of a confrontation with a drunk last night.”

  “I got four drunks in the lockup right now,” Tom said. “Your boy’s most likely one of them. You want to press charges or anything?”

  “Naw, no bother.”

  “Someone came riding in on a bike a few hours ago from the North Fork, said a trailer burned there and old Granny Thomas burned to death in it.

  “Damn,” John whispered.

  Kate looked out the window and then back to John. “So why are your car and Jim’s running?”

  John looked around for a chair and sat down without being asked, then handed over the report he had pulled down from his shelf the night before and tossed it on Kate’s desk.

  “Something from my war college days.”

  “‘Potentials of Asymmetrical Strikes on the Continental United States,’” Kate read the cover.

  “Some of us working at the war college put it together for a series of lectures. No one listened, of course, other than the officers taking our classes. I kept a copy as a reference. What you want is chapter four on EMP.”

  “EMP,” Charlie said quietly. “Exactly what I thought when I saw all the stalled cars on the highway. Glad you came in, in fact was hoping you might know something.”

  “All right, not to sound like the dumb female in the crowd here,” Kate said sharply, “but what the hell are you guys talking about?”

  John couldn’t resist looking over at Tom.

  “Heard of it, but don’t really remember. Are you saying this is some sort of terrorist thing?” John nodded.

  “EMP. Electromagnetic Pulse. It’s the by-product of a nuclear detonation.”

  “We’ve been nuked?” Kate asked, obviously startled. “I think so.”

  “Jesus Christ, what about fallout? We got to start moving on that right now.”

  John shook his head.

  “Give me a minute, Kate. This gets a little complex. When you got some time, read the article; that will explain it better.”

  “John, have we been nuked? Is this a war?”

  “Kate, I don’t know. I know as much as you do at the moment as to what is going on outside of right here, in Black Mountain, but that alone tells me a lot.”

  “How so?”

  John took a deep breath and looked at the Styrofoam cup on her table, the paper plate covered with crumbs.

  “Look, guys, I hate to ask this. I’m starved and could use a little more caffeine.”

  No one moved for a second. Kate made it a point to remain firmly in her chair, not budging an inch.

  “We got a pot boiling out back,” Charlie said, and left the room and came back a minute later with a cup of coffee, black the way John always liked it, and, amazingly, some bacon and eggs.

  “Picture an EMP as something like a lightning bolt striking your electrical line or phone line during a thunderstorm.” John said between quick sips of his coffee. “Boom, and everything electronic in your house is fried, especially delicate stuff with microcircuitry in it. That bolt is maybe packing thousands of amps the microchip in your computer runs on hundredths of an amp. It just cooks it off.”

  Kate said nothing, giving him a moment to wolf down one of the eggs and a piece of bacon before continuing.

  “Back in the 1940s, when we started firing off atomic bombs to test them, this pulse wave was first noticed. Not much back then with those primitive weapons, but it was there. And here’s the key thing: there were no solid-state electronics back in the 1940s, everything was still vacuum tubes, so it was rare for the small pulses set off by those first bombs to damage anything.

  “We finally figured out that when you set off a nuke in space, that’s when the EMP effect really kicks in, as the energy burst hits the upper atmosphere. It becomes like a pebble triggering an avalanche, the electrical disturbances magnifying. It’s in the report. It’s called the “Compton Effect.”

  “Now come forward. When we did those articles back in the nineties, we were getting word that the Chinese were doing a helluva lot of research on how to boost the EMP from a nuclear blast, making it a helluva lot more powerful.”

  “So it’s the Chinese who hit us?” Tom asked. “Damn bastards.”

  “I don’t know,” John said, a bit exasperated. “No one knows, at least not here, not yet. Maybe even the Pentagon doesn’t know yet.”

  He hesitated after saying that, thinking of Bob Scales up there. Did the Pentagon exist? There was no news. One scenario that his group had kicked around was an initial EMP strike to take down communications, then selected ground bursts of nukes on key sites to finish the job… and of course D.C. would be the first hit.

  It was maddening; John just did not know.

  “How can nobody know anything around here?” Kate snapped.

  “That’s the whole idea behind an EMP strike,” John replied. “Whether a full-scale strike from a traditional foe like Russia during the Cold War or a terrorist hit now. You pop off a nuke that sends out this strong electromagnetic wave, it fries off communications, and a lot of other things, then either sit back or continue. The frightful thing we realized was that some third-rate lunatic, either a terrorist cell member or the ruler of someplace like North Korea or Iran, with only one or two nukes in their possession, could level the playing field against us in spite of our thousands of weapons. That’s what is meant by ‘asymmetrical strike.’”

  “So, is the whole country like this right now?” Kate asked. “Or is it just us?”

  He shook his head.

  “Look, I’m kinda tired, sat up most of the night keeping watch on the house, so let me try to explain this in order if that’s ok.”

  “Sure, John, take your time,” Charlie intervened.

  “Well, at the same time the potential energy release of EMP grew, and believe me, I don’t understand the technical side of it at all, just that I know that it happens when a nuke goes off and we suspect there’s ways of calibrating a small nuke to give off a high yield of energy. Our electronic equipment was getting more and more sensitive to it.”

>   “No one saw an explosion,” Charlie said, “and believe me, I’ve asked around, kind of suspecting the same thing.”

  “That’s just it, it’s in the report,” and John motioned to the article on Kate’s desk.

  She looked at it, thumbed through it.

  “Mind if we run off some copies?…” And she fell silent, blushing slightly at what sounded like a dumb comment.

  “We’re all conditioned,” John said with a reassuring smile. “I tried to make coffee in the machine this morning. It’s ok, Kate.”

  She smiled sheepishly and nodded. “Go on, John.”

  “Well, to Charlie’s question. EMP doesn’t really hit unless you blow off the bomb above the atmosphere. Again the ‘Compton effect,’ and believe me, I’ve read about it, but don’t have a real grasp on it myself; I need a tech head for that. Just that the burst above the atmosphere sets off an electro-disturbance, kind of like a magnetic storm, which cascades down into the lower atmosphere like a sheet of lightning and bango, it fries everything with electronics in it.”

  “Just one bomb?” Kate asked.

  He nodded.

  “Remember a TV back in the fifties, the early sixties, all those tubes, and hot as hell? That same thing now sits in the palm of my kid’s hand when she’s playing one of those damn games.”

  He wondered for a second if maybe all the pocket-size computer toys were gone…. If so, no regrets there at least.

  “So the stuff gets more and more delicate, and more and more prone to even the slightest electrical surge.”

  “Someone could now fire off a nuke, calibrated to do a maximum load of EMP, and anything within line of sight from up in space gets fried, even from a thousand miles away. For that matter, anything hooked into our electrical web goes as well. Electrical lines are like giant antennas when it comes to EMP, and guide it straight into your house, through the sockets, and, wham, right into anything hooked up.”

  “Surge protectors, though?” Kate said. “I spent a hundred bucks on one for my new television.”

  He shook his head.

  “Surge protectors don’t work for this,” Charlie interjected, and John looked over at him.

  “We had one, exactly one, briefing on this about two years ago,” Charlie said. “Hundreds on every other threat, just one on this, but I remember somebody asking that question. Seems like this EMP moves a lot faster than ordinary power surges like from lightning. Not faster in terms of speed, just that the impact hits and peaks faster, three or four times that of a lightning bolt hitting your electric line. So fast that the relay inside the surge protector doesn’t have time to trigger off and boom, the whole system is fried. That’s why it’s so darn dangerous. It fries out all electronics before any of the built-in protections can react.”