“I don’t.” He rapped his fingers against the wood table. “But unless everyone, including you and I, are totally crazy…hell, we can’t be having a mass hallucination.”
Silence enveloped them as she allowed what he’d said to sink into her. “Okay, so maybe this is the weirdest thing either one of us has encountered. Doesn’t mean we have to freak.”
His gaze lifted from the table to her. “I’m freaking right now.”
“What do we do about it? Anything?”
“Don’t know that we can. We can stay away from the house, number one.”
“That should be easy.” As soon as she said it, she wondered. “On the other hand…”
One of his eyebrows quirked upward. “What?”
“When you saw me I was ready to walk up to the house again.”
He put his hand over hers. “What were you thinking?”
She frowned, more disturbed than she had been in a long, long time. “I don’t think I had a thought in my head. Just to do it.”
He squeezed her cold hand, and when he withdrew his touch, she wanted to tell him to hold her hand again, to make the connection that told her all this weirdness was real. “Both of us are drawn there, and we have a hard time resisting it.”
“Yes.”
“We need a plan. We’ll do things together until our vacation is over. We won’t get near the place because we’ll be too busy.”
A sense of purpose and relief made her smile. “That sounds like a good idea.”
“Even though you’re mad at me?”
Cassie admitted it. “I was a little pissed you wouldn’t acknowledge something was going on up at the house.”
“Now that I have?”
“You’re outta the dog house. At least temporarily.”
He grinned. “Good. I have an idea for the first thing we should do.”
“Oh?”
“There’s another place like the Point that I heard about. It’s one town over. If you’d like something new to sketch, we could go there.”
She liked the idea immensely, and maybe it would get rid of this prickly sense she had in the back of her mind. “Sounds good. Let’s do it.”
As the returned inside that prickling sense of unease overtook her again. She thought she heard a lot of people talking, and an alarm went off inside her. She started toward the front desk.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Something’s happening.”
When they arrived at the front desk, around thirty people were gathered and quite a few of them sounded worried. Some raised their voices. Penny was behind the front desk, and she sounded as if she was trying to reassure them.
“What the hell’s going on?” Cassie asked Griff as they stopped a ways from the group.
Before he could answer, Cassie saw the closed captioning on the flat screen TV over the fireplace in the lobby. She grabbed Griff’s forearm in reaction.
As they read the words she suddenly understood the reason for the prickling unease she’d felt earlier.
“Son of a bitch,” Griff said under his breath.
Blackout: Chapter Seven
“That’s all we’ve got?” the man standing near Griff said in an angry tone, as if Griff could change the truth. “Three days?”
Cassie saw Griff’s reaction, the subtle impatience in his eyes. Griff restrained himself and kept his tone even. “Could be less.”
“Jesus,” another man said, this guy older. He put his arm around his wife. “End times.”
Cassie winced, wanting to berate the man for going that far. But she didn’t want an argument and it wouldn’t help anything. Besides the fact her heart hadn’t stopped banging against her ribcage since they’d read the closed captioning. Penny had quickly taken the television off mute and closed captioning.
Cassie’s mind kept flashing back to the tsunami all those years ago, and a horrible sense of déjà vu threatened to unhinge her hard-won stability.
The reporter, looking scared shitless, had given the breaking news. The gasps that had gone up around the room had evaporated into weeping among a couple of the younger women. Several couples had rushed off, not saying where they were going to or why. That left Penny, Griff, Cassie and the much smaller group of ten.
“One to three days is a hell of a lot better than nothing.” Griff’s voice sounded brusque but calm. “There are things we can do to mitigate this situation.”
The reporting went on, and it didn’t matter which channel Penny checked. They all said the same thing. Another reporter already had a so-called expert sitting in the studio with him.
“Dr. Abrams, thank you so much for being with us here today. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of very frightened people out there. But first can you explain to them exactly what is happening?” the reporter asked.
Dr. Abrams, a middle-aged man with a dark beard and glasses, looked very calm. “Henry, this is indeed a serious situation. The NOAA Prediction Center in Boulder has given notice that a geomagnetic storm could put us in extreme danger.” The roughness in his voice didn’t betray nervousness. “We have about one to three days before the electromagnetic pulse occurs as a result of a coronal mass ejection from the sun. What is called an X-class event.”
“And what does that mean, doctor?” the reporter asked.
Dr. Abrams looked grim. “There is more than one stage to this. First stage is the actual solar flare, second is the radiation storm, and the second is the coronal mass ejection. The ACE satellite launched in ninety-seven by NASA monitors the parameters of solar events and solar winds, the polarity.”
“In layman’s terms what does that mean for us?” the reporter asked.
“Without some immediate preparation such as a controlled shut down of the grid to minimize damage, we’ll have a hell of a mess on our hands. Radio and electricity may be gone through the destruction of electrical circuits. Microchips will fry. Power lines will overload. Cars, computers, subways, cell phones, and airplanes may or may not work…with the exception of special military planes designed to withstand EMP.”
“There goes that new iPhone I bought last week,” a middle-aged man in a suit said just before he rushed out of the front door of the hotel.
“When it gets here we can expect power outages,” the expert on television said. “My guess is that several grids will be shut down in advance of the EMP to make sure there is less damage to the infrastructure. That in itself is good news. But there are large transformers that could be totally destroyed. High voltage transmission would build up, and when that happens it goes into the transformers and destroys whole grids. And it takes eighteen months minimum to make one of these transformers.”
“Eighteen months,” a woman near Cassie whispered, her voice struck with horror.
“Dr. Abrams, aren’t there quite a few of our electronics which can survive this stuff?” the reported asked.
Dr. Abrams stroked his beard for a moment. “People already prepared for this sort of thing will fare the best. Survivalists and preppers who’ve built Faraday cages to protect electronic devices. They have enough food, water, and supplies to take them into the next few years or more. Those are the only people prepared for what will happen.”
“What about transportation?” the reporter asked.
“Transportation will be a nightmare. There’s controversy about which cars would work and which ones won’t. Commercial airlines should shut down operations to make certain their communications aren’t compromised and that no planes fall out of the sky. “
“What’s a Faraday cage, doctor?” the reporter asked.
“It absorbs or reflects electrical charge and preserves the electronics within whatever device its protecting,” the doctor said.
“How long could it take us to recover from something like this?” the reporter asked.
“Full recovery of infrastructure could take up to ten years.”
Now the reporter looked disconcerted, his calm facade crackin
g a bit as his voice went husky. “Shouldn’t we have been better prepared for this?”
“Shit,” Griff said in a disgusted tone so low Cassie figured only she could hear him. “Here it comes. The finger pointing.”
Dr. Abrams said, “We can never be fully prepared for this. Perfection isn’t possible.”
“What happens from here now?” the reporter asked.
“Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye,” another man said as he led away his sobbing wife.
Dr. Abrams was responding, “National Guard will be on standby in case there’s social chaos. The aurora, when it gets here, will be visible everywhere, even on the dark side of the earth. That’s going to freak out a lot of people who’ve never seen Northern Lights.”
The man’s voice faded and Cassie realized her own thoughts raced. She couldn’t listen to another announcement about the horrors they’d face when the EMP took out the grid. She took one deep breath and then another.
You’ve done this before Cassie. You survived a disaster before. You can damn well do it again.
She turned to Griff and touched his arm. He tore his gaze from the television and looked at her and, to her surprise, he placed his fingers over hers.
“You okay?” His voice turned soft and concerned, eyes no longer cold.
“Yes. No. You said we can mitigate things. What do we need to do now?”
“First make sure these people understand not to panic.”
“That’s not going to be easy. Some of them already are.”
“Yes, but we have to try.”
She understood. Prepare first, panic later. Or at least she couldn’t allow herself to panic or feel helpless. Freaking wouldn’t help, and she knew that from experience dealing with her ex-husband and then the tsunami. Griff’s fingers tightened over hers, and she entertained the wild idea that for the end of civilization as they knew it, she couldn’t be in better hands.
“Okay, people, we’re wasting time standing around here. There are things we can and should do right now,” Griff said.
The five people remaining in the lobby included Penny, and she looked scared spitless. Cassie couldn’t blame her.
“We’re leaving and driving as far as we can get,” a man said as he took hold of his teenage son’s arm. “We have to get back to my wife in Cheyenne.”
Penny ran from around the side of the counter. “At least take food and water. Free of charge. You don’t know how far you’ll get.”
“You won’t be any better off leaving here. You should ride it out here where things are simpler. It could be worse in a bigger city,” Griff said.
A younger man Cassie hadn’t seen before asked, “How do you know so much about this?”
Cassie wondered the exact same thing.
“I’m a Fed. We learn about these things,” Griff said.
Cassie didn’t believe him and apparently no one else in the room did either.
“We’ll take our chances on our own,” the man with his son said.
Penny grabbed the man’s arm. “No. Take some food and water. Please.”
The man sighed. “All right.”
“I’m getting the hell out of here, too,” another young man said. “I’ll take some of that food.”
Penny led them toward the kitchens.
“Damn,” Griff said when the lobby was empty save for Cassie and him and the babbling television. “So much for not panicking.”
Cassie’s insides rumbled around, gelatin-like. She put one hand to her stomach. “We can’t control what anyone else does, Griff. Only ourselves.”
When he looked down at her, she realized her arm was now linked through the crook of his elbow as if he were her only lifeline. She didn’t want to let go.
“You’re right again.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Then lets save ourselves.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Her mouth was so dry, she licked her lips. She caught him staring at her mouth, and suddenly she wanted him to kiss her. To reassure her everything would be fine and this was all a bad dream. Instead she decided reality came first, as much as she hated it. “How do you know about this EMP? Do you read a lot of science programs or did they really teach you about this stuff?”
“They didn’t teach anything about this type of event in particular.”
She waited for him to explain, to give up some of the secrets he obviously held close to his vest. “And?”
“I read a lot.”
She puffed air out in exasperation. “Uh-huh.” She gave up for the time being. “Never mind, Griff. I’m not going to probe into your vast well of Secret Squirrel past. I just want to know what we should do next.”
He looked relieved, and she wondered what in the hell could be so horrible in his past he couldn’t even tell her in a crisis. But if it was that bad, maybe she didn’t want to know.
“First thing we need is some food and water supplies.” A thoughtful look entered his eyes. “There’s also something I need to do with the Charger. We’ll have to go to Mr. Tracy’s garage for that.”
“I take it you don’t mean the grocery store. It’ll be a zoo already.”
“We’ll get some from Penny. We’ll pay her for it. She definitely might need the money later. Right now I’d go to the ATM over there and see how much you can get out of your accounts.” He took his wallet out and gave her his ATM card and told her his pin number. “Take as much out of mine as you can, too.”
She made a soft noise of surprise. “You’re trusting me with this?”
“Yeah. Don’t spend it all in one place, okay?”
The touch of humor in his eyes pulled her up from a sinking depth.
“I’m going outside and take something out of my car to keep any bastards from stealing it,” he said. “Get what you can from Linda in the way of food and water and take it up to my room.”
“Why your room?” she asked as he started to walk away. When he kept walking, she snagged his arm. “Wait. The world may be coming apart at the seams but I’m not automatically moving into your room because you think it’s a good idea.”
His eyes flashed, and she saw a little anger in them. “Don’t you trust me?”
Did she? Maybe not. He’d certainly given her no reason not to trust him other than not revealing his past. “I’ve known you less than a week. I’ve spent ten years getting back my independence. I’m not giving it up all in one night.”
“All right, Cassie. You’ll do want you want no matter what I say.” The anger stayed in his eyes. “Do you want to come with me to Mr. Tracy’s garage and see if he can help us with my plan?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good. See you in a bit.”
She stifled a snort and went for the ATM while he left to take care of his car.
A short time later she’d taken out four hundred dollars from her account and the same from his—noting how much money was in his account blew her away. A lot of cash. But what did she know about federal pay? She stuffed the money and the cards in her wallet and hurried through the restaurant and back toward the kitchens. She half expected to see Penny with the father and son, but she found Penny standing in the kitchen with two cooks, a woman somewhere in her thirties and an older man who looked about sixty. Two waitresses also stood by.
“Everything all right?” Cassie asked.
“I’m letting them go home to their families and get ready for the…” Penny held her hands out, apparently unable to think of the right words. “Whatever comes.”
Both the man and the woman hugged Penny and soon they’d abandoned the kitchen. Cassie watched as the waitresses gave Penny a tearful goodbye and also departed. Penny and Cassie stared at each other, and Cassie felt as dumbstruck as the manager. No one knew how to react to this situation, except maybe Griff.
“Where’s Griff?” Penny asked.
“Making sure no one steals his car. He’s got an older model that might not give out if an EMP hits.”
“If?”
Cassie sighe
d. “It might not be as bad as they say.”
Penny rubbed her temples and closed her eyes. “Everyone’s leaving as if they think they can outrun this thing.”
Cassie’s insides still felt wobbly, as if the strength and endurance she held on to this moment could bottom out. She closed her eyes for a moment, and in a split second saw the ocean rising up at her. The monster was coming. Coming.
No.
Cassie forced her eyes open. “There isn’t anywhere they can run to get away.”
“I know.” Penny’s eyes teared up.
Cassie couldn’t restrain her own tears as two escaped. Penny rushed up to hug her, and then released her just as quickly.
“It’ll be all right,” Penny said.
“Have most of the people staying here left already?”
“A good chunk. There were some out at tourist stops nearby. I’m sure they’ll come by to pick their things up.” Penny suddenly looked scared. “I’ll be alone in this place.”
Alone. Oh, yeah. Cassie had faced a night alone after the tsunami. She knew how that felt.
“You don’t have family?” Cassie asked.
Penny drew her bottom lip between her lips. “No. Well, there’s my son. But I just now found him.”
“Oh?”
“He was adopted out when I was sixteen. Benson. He’s my son.”
“Oh.” Cassie felt like an idiot with her half-baked responses. “Has he turned up yet today?”
“No.” Worry creased Penny’s brow. “I’m considering going to the police. I looked in his room…he’s living in the area on the third floor that I converted into a two bedroom apartment. He’s…all his stuff is there except for his wallet and cell phone.”
“You don’t have anyone who can watch the front desk while you go to the police?”
“No. Like I said, I let them all go home. They need to be with their family and friends and make preparations for this event.”
“Good thinking,” a male voice came from behind them.
Cassie swung around, startled. McPhee stood there, his expression grim and resigned. “Dougray. Do you know—”
Holding Out For A Hero: SEALs, Soldiers, Spies, Cops, FBI Agents and Rangers Page 127
