by John Barnes
Somewhere well past midnight, the engine suddenly seized and died. Beth cried out and woke up; Jason sat up, breathing hard. Not willing to let cold air into the car, he crawled forward and tried to restart it; the starter cranked without success. He left the heater fan running on battery power, recirculating the warm air from inside the car, to extract the last heat from the radiator. KP-1 was still on the air, reporting that they’d gotten ten-hour-old Internet voice mail from Banff, Alberta, and were passing on a request for the government in Ottawa, dissolving provincial governments till further notice, and asking that local governments report ASAP.
Beth curled up and went back to sleep. Jason eventually did too, but for a while he kept waking from dreams about Elton’s body dangling from the barn’s pulley. Something about the radio creeped him out, as if the old plaztatic world was lunging to get him, and the stars were too far away to save him.
THE NEXT DAY. CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND. 7:30 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
“Hey, am I crazy, or is there a newsboy down on the street?” Lenny asked.
“Those are not mutually exclusive questions.” Heather rushed to the window beside him. On the sidewalk below, a boy of about ten waved a paper over his head, shouting, “Read all about it!”
“Might as well see if we’re both hallucinating,” she said, strapping on sneakers.
In the street, she asked “How much?”
The boy smiled. “One paper for five dollars paper money or one can or box of food, has to be edible by itself, no fridge stuff, and I don’t make change on food,” proud that he’d remembered the whole spiel.
Heather traded a ten for a five and took the paper upstairs. It felt strangely like the local newspaper she could remember from when she’d been in college and had occasionally read one out of boredom; it was even about as thick as the Costaguana Weekly Courier, and had the same smeary, slightly greasy feel to it.
The front page had a little box:
For stores, restaurants, and warehouses known to be empty of food, see pages 4-6.
Three full pages listed all the stores both individually and by chain, noting the few of them that were still open to sell toiletries, cleaning supplies, and so forth. “Probably I can get some deals on disinfectant,” Heather said, “if I hustle over to the Safeway three blocks over.”
“Also check Rite Aid,” Lenny suggested. “Especially home hair-dye kits.”
“Are we going in disguise?”
“They have goopy extra-strength peroxide. We can use it to scrub around the seals on the windows, the air intake for the generator engine, stuff like that. Wonder if the gasoline would be safer if we could add antibiotics to it? Or if that would just spoil it?”
“We could—shit. I was about to say maybe we could Goo-22 antibiotics and gasoline. How the hell did people find things out before the net?”
“Think about when we were kids. Phone books, dictionaries, paper encyclopedias—”
“Well, yeah, when I was a little kid. Mostly I remember the heap of them in the Dumpster when the school got a grant. How long since anything like that’s been produced? 2015?”
“Yeah. I can’t imagine anyone ever thought about gasoline spoiling anyway.” Lenny sighed and ran through the autochecks on the control screen of his wheelchair, which was becoming a nervous habit. “Well, it was a nice thought. I have fuel enough for about a week, but it’ll be infected well before then.”
“And there’s food in the fridge and freezer for about that long. It won’t benefit us at all if it spoils. So we’d better have breakfast today and read the paper to each other like more or less normal people.”
They skipped reading the text of Shaunsen’s speech and agreed that they liked Rusty Parlotta’s editorials calling for everyone to admit that the system was down and act more like a grown-up about it. Lenny thought Chris Manckiewicz’s reporting was biased too liberal, and Heather that it was just liberal enough. “I wonder if they’ll have comics, and sports pages, like old-time papers?” Lenny said, as they were eating the last of the mixed, chopped fresh fruit. “I’d like that.”
“Me too. My dad used to read me Rose is Rose and Heart of the City, and we always went over the stats on the Lakers every Sunday in the Times.” The classified ads were mostly people looking to barter expensive cars and computers for canned food and guns. There were black smears on her hands, just below the little fingers. “On the other hand, the Web was never quite this grubby. There couldn’t be lead in the ink, could there?”
“That little story about ‘local printer-hobbyist finds new occupation’ said he didn’t use lead-based inks, but it doesn’t hurt for either of us to be washing hands constantly, considering.”
While she was scrubbing, the phone rang; she heard him talking for a minute before he wheeled into the bathroom. “Cameron Nguyen-Peters wants us to attend a meeting of DRET at DHS.”
“What’s DRET?”
“Daybreak Research and Evaluation Team; it means ‘Cam’s bunch of smart people that help him figure stuff out.’ They’ve got a biowar-rigged Hummer that sprays its own tires with disinfectant and has an extensive air filter system, coming to pick you up in about half an hour.”
“For me? You said he wanted—”
“I think I’d better not go outside any more than I have to; in here, I’ve got it mostly sealed and as disinfected as I can get it, but out there, I could come down with nanoswarm or biotes, and be just as dead as any transistor radio. I’ll have to work mostly by letter and phone from now until there’s a better solution.”
“I don’t like the idea of leaving you here by yourself.”
She could hear him trying not to snap at her. “And I don’t like being confined to the house, but I think I’ll have to live with it. Meanwhile, I’m moderately well-armed, the place has power on to support me, I can fix most of what will break in here, it’s a lot safer from contamination, and we both have work to do. I’ll be here, you’ll be there, we’ll be fine. I’ll set out a dish basin with some disinfectant at the door; when you come back, be sure you dip your shoes and scour everything else.”
ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. MARANA. ARIZONA. 8:30 A.M. MST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
When Kai-Anne pulled the curtain aside to see what the noise was about, she jumped back; a man with a bat stood in their driveway. She looked again and saw that there were perhaps twenty people with bats and guns. She didn’t know what it was about but she knew she wanted a cop. She checked the landline; no luck. The cell phone was dead too.
“What’s going on, hon?”
Greg’s voice was low, trying not to wake the kids.
“Bunch of people outside with guns and bats,” she said, trying not to sound nearly as scared as she felt.
“Shit. We’re dealing with excessive citizen initiative here; remind me to thank the Acting President and the Moron Stream Media. Answer, but don’t open the door if they get up the nerve to knock. I gotta dress. Don’t go out there yet.”
What’s he mean, yet? He can’t mean he’s going to—
They were shouting at each other out there, arguing about something or maybe nerving each other up. Please let that be an argument. The only person she could distinctly understand was the guy outside the door with the bat; he was yelling at people to calm down, we just gotta ask some questions, just some questions, let’s not guess till we asked our questions.
Greg came out in uniform; he could always be dressed in less than a minute. “My guess is they saw that hippie chick that nobody knows very well going in and out in the middle of the night, and decided there’s a terrorist here. I just need to have a little talk with them.” He looked her up and down for a moment and said, “You’re perfect.”
“I am?”
“Nobody’s going to believe you’re a terrorist in a Winnie the Pooh sweat suit with baby-puke stains. You’ll see. Come on.”
When he opened the door and stepped out, holding her hand, she saw one old guy in the back pointing the rifle, and t
hought, No, don’t, please listen—
Greg looked over the crowd. “Let me introduce myself. Captain Greg Redmond, U.S. Air Force. I fly an A-10 out of Davis-Monthan. Anybody here want to take a look at my service ID?”
The guy with the rifle lowered it; the crowd didn’t seem to know what to do.
“Anybody?”
Mr. Loud Baseball Bat set the bat down, looked at Greg’s ID carefully, and said, “It’s Air Force, and it’s him.”
“All right,” Greg said, “So we’ve established who I am. This is my wife, Kai-Anne, and the mother of our three children, who some of you have probably seen around the neighborhood. Most of you know it’s not easy being an Air Force wife, I guess, with all the moving and me being away a lot, and even harder being a mother of some little ones.
“Now, I’m just guessing, but I think you might be standing out on my lawn because somebody on the television, or the Internet, or something, said to watch out for people who were coming and going in the middle of the night before last, when our country was attacked. So I thought I’d just tell you all that Kai-Anne was picking me up from the base, because they let me come home for the night, after I was out flying all day because of that whole situation with Air Force Two. And because we’re all pretty worried about our country today, you were concerned that she might have been involved with this Daybreak thing, or maybe with the murder of our Vice President and you came here about that.”
By now all the bats were drooping, the handguns were holstered, and the rifles and shotguns pointed safely at the ground.
Greg nodded politely. “Well, what you have found is one tired Air Force pilot who wants some more sleep, and one Air Force wife with too much to do, who happens to have dreads and a couple tattoos. By the way, her husband likes all those. And three little kids sleeping. That’s all.
“If you’d called the police, they could have come out and looked and made sure it was okay, without all this disturbance for everyone. So I’m betting you’ll hear of other houses where people came and went late last night, because there’s always people that need medicine in the middle of the night, or people who pull a night shift, or even I guess guys sneaking back in after an affair.”
“How would you feel about that, Kai-Anne?” a voice called from the crowd.
“Anything I wanted done to him, I’d do myself,” she said.
There was a nervous, stuttering laugh, and people began to drift away. In a few minutes, the crowd was gone; a couple of older men came forward to thank Greg for his service and assure him they “didn’t mean nothing.”
“Did you recognize any of them?” Greg asked, when they were standing alone on the porch. “Remind me why we moved here.”
“You wanted to be somewhere safe for the kids, and I wanted to be someplace quiet, away from the base, where nobody would bother us or pay attention to how we lived.”
He started to laugh, and hugged her. Maybe life wasn’t all that bad, anyway.
ABOUT 45 MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:45 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
For the moment, DRET turned out to be Heather’s Daybreak Working Group, including Arnie and Steve from Deep Black, plus Graham, minus Lenny and Agent Reynolds, plus a promised staff of as many as they needed as fast as they could hire them. They were all queuing up for lunch as Heather arrived. “The crew at your checkpoints looks pretty nervous,” Heather said to Cameron. “Have you had incidents?”
“I woke up once during the night when a drunk got obstreperous at a guard post outside, because he wanted to know why we had lights and he didn’t, and he’d apparently never heard of a Coleman lantern.”
“So you’re sleeping here now?”
“As much as I can persuade people, everyone will be soon,” Cam said. “You and Lenny would be very welcome, Graham moved in this afternoon, Crittenden and his wife will be here before tonight, and I think I’ve got Arnie and Allison talked into it. Jim Browder is insisting on hanging on to his big house way out past the Beltway for three reasons—one, he can’t get over the fact that it’s the house he always dreamed of; two, his wife would never leave it; and three, he’s an idiot.”
“No kidding. But we all are. I think Lenny will want to stay in his apartment until the power fails. And I won’t leave till he does. It’s not easy to adjust to the new conditions, is it?”
“I guess not. I’ll be a lot happier if this facility can serve as a dorm for the emergency management team. There’s a lot of unused space at St. Elizabeth’s right now, with the offices that have left and DHS not yet fully moved in, so we have the room. And it’s relatively easy to protect the grounds.”
“You’re expecting trouble?”
“Should I stop expecting trouble right now, when so much of it just arrived?” Cam permitted himself one of his little, tight-lipped smiles. “Every time we did a simulation or a game-out of any widespread, multiple-path emergency, the Red team always hit us with an assassination, or a kidnapping, or general bad stuff happening to the critical personnel in Blue. And when Red didn’t do that, the refs did—‘the physicist you need is trapped on a collapsing bridge,’ that kind of thing.
“I don’t want to lose anybody. So if you can, see if you can talk your guy into moving down here; I wish we could give him accommodations as good as he has up in Chevy Chase, but he’s going to be losing those within a week anyway no matter what, and we might as well move him while we’re still fairly sure of having some motor vehicles running.”
“Makes sense. I just don’t want to think about trying to persuade Lenny to accept being dependent at all—he’ll hate that so much.”
“Don’t we all?” Cameron asked. “All the—”
His phone rang; he spoke for just a moment and then said, “More mess. The meeting will start late because I’ve got to run to another one; I’ll be back with you in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, enjoy lunch and have brilliant thoughts that solve all our problems.” He trotted away.
Since she was last in line, Heather sweet-talked the lady and got two sandwiches to take home for Lenny.
ABOUT THREE MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:55 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
Cameron Nguyen-Peters slipped into the small room and said, “I have just a few minutes but I’m told this is urgent?”
“We think so,” the tall man with narrow shoulders and thick glasses said. “I’m Dan Tyrel, your NOAA liaison. Weather forecasting. This just came in from Navy radiofax; they’ve been loaning us computers and satellite links from the Atlantic fleet, so we can still do some weather forecasting.”
He held up a piece of paper; Cameron looked and saw an immense white pinwheel in the Gulf of Alaska. “Big storm, that’s all I see there.”
“That’s the first major winter storm. We’ve been in Indian summer the last couple weeks. When that comes across it will bring high winds, blowing snow, the works,” Tyrel, the NOAA liaison, said. “A little early this year but not unusually so.”
“We’ve put an alert out on KP-1 and Radio Blue and Gold,” the short black man beside him said. “I’m Waters, your Agriculture liaison, and I bet you didn’t know you needed one.”
Cam nodded. “Well, now that you mention it, it’s obvious. How bad a storm are we looking at here, and what will it do to us?”
Tyrel said, “Snow in the Rockies and maybe the Great Plains, freezing rain in the Great Plains and the Upper Midwest, and cold and very wet wherever the main track exits the continent, on the average that’s the Chesapeake Bay area, but it could exit as far north as Maine or as far south as Georgia.”
Waters jumped in. “With snow over frozen ground, and the farm machinery not running, winter wheat will be a problem; some of it won’t get planted even though we have seed, unless we can maybe get some of the urban refugees out there planting with pointed sticks in the next thaw. The feedlots are so dense that pigs and cattle can probably keep each other alive just from body heat, if they can find enough food for them. Poultry factory systems have to be heat
ed in cold weather, so we’re losing a lot of chickens and turkeys in the Midwest in another day or two. We can put word out for pre-emptive slaughter but they may not have workers to do it, and we don’t have the facilities to can or preserve most of the meat.
“The biggest impact is on range cattle, and that’s huge, because the ranchers in the Mountain States were one of our best hopes of feeding everyone in the next few years. A mild wet winter, that would have helped immensely. As it is—well, there’s just not time to bring all the cattle and sheep in. No way. And we’re going to lose some ranchers, besides some cattle; some of them will get caught out in that, trying to save their stock, and when they do, we lose a skill and knowledge base that took decades to build.”
“How many more storms like this, this year?” Cameron asked.
“Maybe as few as three, maybe as many as nine, winter storms come in on that track every year,” Tyrel said. “Some that just give everyone a cold, snowy day, some that are bad like this, now and then one as bad as the Blizzard of ’86.”
“I don’t even remember that one.”
“1886,” Waters said. “Destroyed the cattle industry for a decade afterward, put an end to the cowboy era. We lived through the one in 1978 because we had helicopters and snowmobiles.”
“What are the odds of anything that bad?”
“This storm, not at all.” Tyrel shrugged. “Not even close for size. The next one or the one after that, god alone knows.”
Cameron stared into space. From now on, I’m going to appreciate every bite of every steak. “And we don’t have anything that can help?”
