INVASION USA (Book 1) - The End of Modern Civilization

by T I WADE

  A second later, he and his crew were also in blackness, and the cold of space instantaneously filled the inner craft, turning the warm 65-degree inside temperature to 160 degrees below zero. A totally frozen Commander Scott still looked down at a black earth, now lighting up again with new fires. He hadn’t had time to move and the frozen glass suddenly shattered in his hand.

  All the other hundreds of unmanned satellites and craft orbiting the Earth, as well as far off in space on missions, with Zedong Electronic parts in every part of their complicated structures, copied what the latest millions of electronic gadgets did down on earth. They shut off, never to work again.

  * * *

  By the time Comrade Chunqiao and his team sat down for lunch and champagne, served by pretty young girls in red dresses, the western world was ablaze, cities already on the verge of destruction, and over fifty million people already dead or dying—and they were the lucky ones.

  * * *

  Many millions of people around the world did not live in cities. They lived in rural communities or poorer countries that did not have plane parts rain down on them from the air. Problems in these areas were more minor for the first 30 minutes and millions slept through the carnage going on in other areas. Most cities that had large commercial airports had some sort of aircraft landing or taking off and were therefore ablaze and many rural areas between those cities where aircraft flight lanes existed also heard explosions and fires erupting where aircraft went down.

  It only took a few minutes for the flying bombs to finally cease, and in many areas not immediately affected, peace was supreme.

  The world was so quiet that farmers woke up thinking something was wrong, and people looked outside their rural communities in the dark and daylight to see why their television, radio, phones, computers, and every electrical appliance in their houses were not working.

  Many Americans were already asleep, warm and cozy for one last night and totally oblivious to the destruction around them.

  * * *

  Raleigh-Durham International Airport had only one flight coming in and one going out. A second flight was about to take off, as with nearly 300 airports worldwide, and in most cases the pilots immediately reacted and aborted their takeoffs as the airfield around them blacked out. Many aircraft managed to complete their landings and waited on, or at, the end of the runway as the lights and their aircraft stopped working. There were no instructions for them to proceed. The out-going Raleigh flight dove into Jordan Lake a couple of miles south of Preston’s farm. The incoming flight, 12 miles east of Preston’s farm, also fell to earth, exploded in a wooded area, and then swept through a housing community killing dozens in its path. It became the only beacon of light as the whole area went black, apart from Preston and Joe’s farms.

  A couple of aircraft further out went down seconds later, the noise of their explosions hardly noticed by anybody in the Raleigh area.

  * * *

  The small town of New Hill ten miles away had a nuclear power station. Shearon Harris was the only power station in the immediate area, and Zedong Electronics had cleverly designed circuitry and automated shut-down programs that could be controlled from a separate microcomputer in their shut-down units, purchased by every power station in the world. Even the United States and Russian navies used them in their nuclear ships. Zedong Electronics did not want to destroy the world, just take it over, and the correct shutdown of the 400 plants worldwide, including plants in China and numerous military mobile nuclear systems was necessary.

  Shearon Harris had hundreds of backup systems, as did all power stations of this type. Zedong had electronics in all the systems, and once the special microcomputer and its second and third backup microcomputers noticed severe problems in the running of any part of the power station, they activated themselves to close down the dangerous radioactive plutonium tubes into safe mode and immediately began to shut down the system for sleep. The Chinese-made fail-safe systems, powered by backup generators that still worked, would supply the cooling water to keep temperatures down for as long as it was needed for a safe and complete shutdown. The 104 nuclear power stations in North America, and all the nuclear stations around the world, closed themselves off and slowly cooled over the next several days and became dormant, waiting for their new owners—and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

  * * *

  Shipping was another problem, as the downed flight in the Hudson had found out. Many ships just lost power and came to a halt, relying on Mother Nature to leave them alone. The nuclear warships around the world were no different, except the submarines which lost every mechanical system on board when their nuclear power systems. Back-up system came on, but many of them were new, modern and fitted with fancy miniature parts from China. As their power units decreased power, the submarines began to dive, just as all the aircraft had done minutes earlier, and many disappeared into the depths never to be seen again, landing on deep sea floors where it was too deep to try and escape. Many were docked in naval bases, on jetties, or moored in shallow water where they were still floating, and they shut down and became expensive pieces of junk.

  Commercial shipping, steaming on cruise power around the world slowed down. In busy shipping lanes, ships began to collide with other ships, or grounded themselves on land, gouging open their thin bottom plates and spewing their goods. Many were anchored, on-loading or off-loading materials, and all the mechanisms helping them stopped and would never move again. Several older ships still had engine power and carried on. Unfortunately, their automated directional systems and modern controls had newer electronics and they continued, now uncontrollable in forward movement. One old World War II destroyer was steaming into Sydney harbor for some sort of celebration and its engines were on three-quarter power and going under the bridge when her modified directional system shut down. The shutdown spun the wheel hard to starboard and the ship went straight into the Sydney Opera House, destroying that part of the harbor area and several blocks behind it as it exploded with a massive blast.

  * * *

  Preston and friends were slowly heading off to bed, leaving only Sally and Carlos downstairs. Sally had offered to help a pretty drunk Carlos carry his bed into the party room that now reeked of all kinds of booze, and instead she pulled his hand to the larger bed in the hangar that was still made up, and she told Carlos to get into bed while she switched off the large lights. He did as he was told, undressed down to his undershorts as Sally turned off all the lights as well as the lights in the party room. She left a single light on so people could find their way out of the side door to get to the house.

  Sally turned as she was about to switch out the light, and surveyed the black shapes of the aircraft still and silent in the large hangar. It surely was a sight to behold and a nice place for a pilot to sleep, and to start a relationship with the man she was intending to marry. She sighed, looked in the direction she had to walk back to Carlos so she wouldn’t trip over anything, and went over to join her man.

  Martie and Preston were also getting ready for bed. He had turned off the radio in the lounge so it would not make any noise while the guests slept, and noticed that Oliver looked a little worried, sniffing the air as if he sensed something in it. Preston switched off the lounge light and got into to bed. The only noise that could be heard was the faint grumbling of the diesel generator behind the shed. He couldn’t even hear the usual noise of the refrigerator in the kitchen, but his father’s old and never missed-a-second alarm clock next to his side of the bed showed 12:55 in big red letters, and he shrugged off checking the refrigerator until morning. The old electric house’s radiant heaters were keeping everybody warm and there was nothing amiss, or so he thought.

  * * *

  At the same time, lunch was a loud affair in the 30-floor board room in Nanjing. There was much celebration going on. If they could see what they had started, then most of them would be sickened by the carnage going on around the world. But in this large room, and
with warm sunlight coming through the large windows, they were a long way from the realities of the rest of the world.

  “Excuse me, Chairman Chunqiao,” started one of the men looking at the large maps on the wall. “It looks like the electricity has come on around the world. There are as many lights, even brighter than before.”

  “Very observant, Comrade,” replied the Chairman. “Several thousand aircraft, all being destroyed at the same time, display about as much power as the old electrical systems. Those, comrades, are fires—fires burning whole city blocks, fires burning whole cities, fires burning capitals all over the world with no fire engines to put them out. Gentlemen.” he paused and looked over the room. “That is our army!” he shouted to the men looking at the world maps and again he raised his glass. “To the army of fire, the army of Zedong Electronics, and to the stupid capitalist Americans who thought they had the strongest army in the world. Where is their army now? In pieces all over the world! Their transport is dead and their military power will be destroyed one by one by our allies. Ours is now the stronger army. That is why we will wait to send in our army, let the fires to do their business and then die down. Soon we will go in and pick up the remains and build what remains into our country, our world, and then the whole world will be ours. Our last success will be the termination of our own government—terminated like the trash they do business with. Then we will be the next Chinese dynasty— and the first dynasty ever to rule our whole planet!”

  * * *

  Out of the 7.2 billion people on Earth at one hour past midnight on January 1st, Eastern Standard Time, 3.8 billion people were having problems they did not have the day before. One billion people were asleep, 1.2 billion were poor and lived in areas where nothing had changed except that the stars looked brighter, 1.15 billion lived in countries that were allies of Zedong Electronics, including parts of China, 250 million people were in desperate trouble, and in uncountable bad situations around the world, dying at a rate of over 100,000 a minute, and the balance; 250 million were already dead, disintegrated, or within seconds of death, in many countries around the world.

  The Internet was down, and no communications were at all possible. There was no electricity, nothing electrical worked and whole countries in the northern hemisphere began to freeze. Roads everywhere had people wandering around by the millions trying to help others, or waiting for help they expected would come. Billions of cars were still and silent everywhere in all kinds of places. Some had crashed into buildings, houses, shops, hedges, trees and many into each other. There were pieces of metal everywhere.

  Every now and again there was vehicle movement on the roads and highways. Older vehicles with carburetors instead of engine-control systems still worked, but they could not get away from the crowds and broken vehicles around them and were quickly mobbed by people begging for a lift. In many cases, the occupants were thrown out and their vehicle taken over by new people, many of whom were armed and hundreds of shots rang out as people tried to protect what belonged to them, or what they had just commandeered.

  The bullets were not picky in choosing their targets—men, women and children fell prey to them on an hourly basis, or were just plain run over if they got in the way. As soon as the current occupants ran out of ammunition, others shot them and pulled them out of the vehicles to take over. Civilization, which had taken more than 2,000 years to create and modernize, disappeared within the first hour in some areas.

  Life was a little better in sunlit areas. The daylight was not as scary as nighttime and people took a little longer to turn on their fellow man. Many helped others, who in turn helped others, but panicked people were always everywhere and they had different thoughts about helping people. They were more interested in helping themselves to other people’s food and water, which were the first two priorities in life, after oxygen to breathe. It was only in high-density areas where already scared and lonely people were trying to wait it out until help arrived, or the lights came back on, and everything would go back to normal. It had to happen!

  Apart from the 16 men in the board room on the 30 floor at Zedong Electronics, the whole world, at war with their current situation, believed that help would come. It always had before! Why not now?

  * * *

  Will Smart was in the station in Lancaster when the world went black. The phone he was on, at one minute passed nine that evening, went dead in his hand seconds after the lights flickered, went on and off several times, and then decided to stay off. He looked at the phone in the dark and tried to place it back on the receiver. He had a powerful torch in his bottom right-hand drawer, next to his police-issued revolver, and he grabbed both. Will was the first to switch a light on, and the several people who had been working around him looked back at him as he played the light on them. Some still had their dead telephone receivers in their hands.

  “What a black out,” he remarked, waiting for the lights to turn back on. “Even the emergency exit lights are dead. Mike, have you ever seen that, the emergency lights going out as well?”

  “No, Will” answered his partner. “Normally we can still see with just the emergency lights on when the overheads go out. This is really a black-out man, it looks just as dark outside.” They heard a sudden crash and vibration through the floor as unknown to them, a car plowed into the building a floor below them. They all got up as one, now with three torches working, and headed for the stairs with guns in hand. Even the emergency stair lights were dead and they used their torches to jump down the stairs.

  They arrived in a group to see that a large SUV had come through the front corner of the wooden four-story building at some speed and the policeman on desk duty was pinned against the wall with blood coming out of his mouth. The lights of the SUV were still on and showed that the policeman’s eyes were already lifeless. As a team, they automatically lifted their guns and aimed at the SUV.

  They didn’t need to see that the two young men in the front seat were in trouble—blood everywhere and the driver’s mouth trying to word something like a fish. His passenger was lifeless and bent over double, a wooden beam sticking into his chest. Two police officers rushed across to the driver’s side to help the young man, who didn’t look older than twenty, and the rest pulled out their police radios to summon an ambulance; the radios were all as dead as the passenger in the SUV.

  Will’s mind was ticking faster than it had ever worked before. He rushed outside through the hole the SUV had made. Lancaster was not as big a city as Los Angeles, but not one vehicle was moving on the streets that he could see or hear. He stood on a dark street corner with the streets going north to south and west to east. There were dozens of vehicles just sitting here and there on the roads, some had been in accidents but most of them looked like they had just come to a stop and people were walking around them. Several had their headlights still on and he could see a local transit bus to the west of him on the opposite side of the road with a line of people getting off. The driver was in his seat, his headlights and interior lights still alight, and he was trying to start it.

  Suddenly, there was a loud explosion on the east side of the city, about a mile or two away and he turned to see a mushroom of flames and smoke erupt into the night sky. A second, fainter explosion happened seconds later, this time to the south of the city, and he looked in that direction and could actually see the large explosion on the hills above Palmdale, several miles away. Then a third explosion lit up the skies again to the east, but the noise was distant and far away.

  “Somebody is bombing us!” he shouted to his partner. “Get the keys to a black and white. I’ll meet you at the entrance to the parking lot. Hurry!” he ordered Mike, who ran in to get keys off a long rack at the rear entrance to the police station, and then rushed out the back to a line of police cars waiting to be used.

  Will ran around to the west side of the building to get to the vehicle gate when another explosion, fainter and in the direction of Los Angeles faintly lit up the sky on the sout
hern horizon. He stopped by the police parking entrance and since it was on an alleyway that extended directly to the south, he could see explosions, one after the other, light up the skies over the hills and inside the built-up area of Los Angeles.

  Then it occurred to him that no partner was arriving with a car, and he ran to the parking area to find Mike trying to get a black and white started.

  “This is the second one I’ve tried,” Mike shouted to Will. “It looks like they are all dead.”

  “How can that happen?” asked Will. “The only thing I know that stops all vehicles is a nuclear explosion. I’ve seen of those in movies, but none of those explosions I saw in Los Angeles were big enough for that, or we’d all be toast by now. It must be something else. Let’s try my old truck.”

  Will’s truck was much like Preston’s—it was an old 1981 Ford 150, and it started on the first try. That totally confused the two detectives who just sat there with a rumbling engine and tried to figure out what was going on.