The Gates_The Arrival

by Max Wyatt

  A push of a button and his phone was ringing. And ringing. And ringing. Voicemail came up, or at least a recorded voice that let her know that this would be where she’d leave a message if her father had ever bothered to set up his voicemail. With a sigh she disconnected and joined the line for the plastic outhouse, thankful that someone had had the foresight to set up facilities since no one had running water with the power off.

  “Come far?” the tired-looking woman in front of her asked while they waited.

  “Connecticut.”

  “You’re going the wrong way. Most folks I know are heading toward Maine. Getting out.”

  “Getting out?” Harper asked in confusion.

  The woman had wild eyes. “They’ll bomb the population centers first, don’t you think?”

  “Bombs?”

  The door opened, the line moved forward. A man in front of them had hands that shook.

  The woman noticed that she had an audience and motioned to Harper to lean in so that she might whisper. “You know, when them Koreans start dropping them nuclear bombs on us.”

  “Koreans?”

  Harper’s voice must have carried because for a moment everyone in the line froze. Heads swiveled in her direction. None of those faces looked even remotely friendly.

  Suddenly intimidated, Harper took a step backwards, then another. “I don’t…I mean, someone else can have my place in line.” With that she fled back to the SUV which had moved up now and was almost at the pumps. She shot into the vehicle, slamming the door behind her, not even caring that she was being positively buried by the rucksack.

  “What’s wrong…what happened…”

  “They think…” Harper’s teeth were chattering. It was a warm night still after the heat of the day and her teeth were chattering.

  “They think what?”

  A loud shout saved her from answering. The Jeep in front of them tried to move up in line, but shuddered and stopped, the engine giving a last groan and dying.

  “Out of gas,” Tara said softly. Harper nodded, thinking that in another time she might have jumped out to offer to help push them forward that they might fill up. But no one moved to help. The next vehicle in line carefully drove around them, taking their place while the driver of the Jeep leapt out of his vehicle shouting imprecations. He seemed high or drunk or something, swaying on his feet as he moved forward to argue with the station attendant, demanding that he be given some gas in a container so he could move the car up. The attendant argued back that there were no more containers, that he’d sold the last of them.

  “Oh boy…” Harper glanced uneasily at Tara. The man was hysterical now, going from car to car, demanding gas. He stumbled against a pickup truck, and tried to wrestle a gas can from the bed of the vehicle. The driver of the pickup didn’t take kindly to the action and a fight broke out.

  “What do we do?” Harper asked, rolling up her window, which seemed ridiculous when no one was paying any attention to them anyway. As if a single pane of glass could keep out the world. They didn’t have a weapon. Why hadn’t they thought to find a weapon of some sort? They had no way to protect themselves. Suddenly the gas station felt exposed. Too full of humanity.

  “We get out gas and get out of here. Simple as that.” It was their turn. Tara maneuvered the SUV around the Jeep, ignoring the shouts, the sounds of fist hitting flesh.

  “Someone should call the police.”

  Apparently, the thought had already occurred to others in the line. New shouts broke out, then a sob. Tara and Harper looked at each other, then stifled screams as someone came up and tapped on their window. It was only the attendant, palm extended to take their cash. “Twenty-five a gallon,” he said when Tara rolled down her window.

  “I thought it was twenty.”

  “That’s when the phones still worked. Twenty-five. Better make up your mind. Price goes up the longer you take.”

  “The phones don’t work?” Harper grabbed at her cell phone, punching the buttons to call her father. Nothing happened. There was no signal. Nothing. “Tara, he’s right.”

  Tara opened her mouth and shut it again. The guy stared her down, eyes of steel. Gritting her teeth she handed over two hundred dollar bills, the last of their funds. “That’s it. We’re out,” she said as he turned away to pump the gas.

  The line had scattered from the bathroom, people fleeing back to their cars. Waving cell phones, she realized. They’ve all discovered the phones don’t work.

  “Now what?” Harper asked, hating the quaver in her voice. Hating that she was asking for reassurance yet again.

  “How the hell should I know?” Tara slammed her hands into her hair, twisting it in great handfuls of sheer pent-up frustration. “I’ve never been to an apocalypse before!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Finn

  Finn shoved the laptop into the bag and reached in a drawer for socks. He rolled up several pair and shoved them in the quickly expanding rucksack and took the laptop out and set it on the table. Power outage meant internet outage. He wasn’t going to be able to use it.

  He found a few DIY books on gardening and home repair. He stashed those in with the socks and the bag stretched to accommodate the extra load. He grabbed the laptop and thrust it back into the bag.

  He looked around his apartment, the knick-knacks he’d collected over the years, the antiques he’d been proud to buy and display, the 4K TV with surround sound. A thousand movies all carefully aligned with their spines in perfect alphabetical order.

  He was leaving the world of high-tech where he was one of the elite, a sailor on the sea of virtual ether. He was going to a place where food was grown from dirt and sweat and toil, where people interacted with sheep and pigs and goats. Where whatever you had, you made or grew. He’d changed already; there was no future now for pressed slacks and designer shirts. Hiking boots, thick socks, flannel shirts and leather work gloves would make up his wardrobe henceforth.

  It was all shoved into the bag, except the clothes he had on his back. Supplies he could manage to get hold of, as limited as they were, already jammed his trunk to where it barely closed. His new life was in the rucksack. It wouldn’t close.

  He crammed and shoved until he heard the bag start to pop its seams, but it wasn’t going to work. Reluctantly, he pulled the laptop and the cord free of the bag and it zipped up neatly. He looked down on the bed, bag and laptop side by side. How appropriate. He snorted. No room in the new world for high-tech. No room for people who only know how to make computers run and use devices that need juice. Welcome to the middle ages, where water is pumped by hand and boiled over wood to stay clean.

  He picked up his phone and laughed. It was a bitter, harsh laugh and even he could hear an edge of hysteria in it. No room for electronics, but the phone didn’t count. It had become so much a part of him, so much him that it seemed like it wasn’t high-tech, any more than his glasses.

  He tapped redial. The phone thought for a very long time and Finn held out hope that it was connecting, that this time it would connect and let him get through. It rang once. He inhaled, his excitement mounting, but then the tell-tale beeping of system errors and wrong calls shattered his last hope of reaching his mother.

  Most of the major cities in Canada had been affected, but the smaller areas had been largely overlooked. It wasn’t cold enough yet to worry about her heat, just brisk enough at night to require a few extra blankets. She would be fine. If he told himself that often enough, he might actually start believing it. He still tried to send a telepathic message to her, something to let her know he was all right, to be sure she was too.

  He grabbed the bag and walked out the door to his apartment. He got to the elevator and turned, unlocked the door and returned to the bedroom to grab the laptop and cord. He carried it out under his arm and paused at the elevator. The power was off again. He turned and took the stairs.

  Walking down five flights was still better than walking up. He cut through to the parkin
g garage and tossed the bag in the passenger seat, the laptop slid between the back of the driver’s side seat and the crap that had piled up in the back seat. He was taking everything he thought might matter. Some things might be useful in bribing his way into the compound. That would matter too.

  The trunk was crammed with potable water, canned goods, dry goods, gasoline, oil, whatever he’d been able to store away over the past few months. Finn’s biggest fear wasn’t in running out, it was in being found out that he’d been hoarding these things. Especially since it was his software, and his failure to spot the attackers before it was too late that had helped to bring on this emergency. If anyone from the government discovered his stash, uncomfortable questions would have been raised.

  The truth was, there was nothing sinister to it. Preparedness had become habit. He’d always had a doomsday supply ongoing wherever he lived. He replaced canned vegetables as he used them, always keeping a large supply of soaps and first aid kits. It was mild affectation brought on by close association with his first roommates from college.

  Back then it had been an adventure, a big game of ‘what if.’ They had pooled their money, gathering up enough emergency survival gear against imminent zombie invasion, trying to see who could accumulate the most creative stockpile. Or, if the zombies didn’t rise before the end of the school year, they’d have one hell of a spring break blowout. Oddly enough, while the zombies where a no-show and the parties were still talked about on campus even now, years later, he’d come away with something more valuable – a habit, well-ingrained. This had been reinforced by the fact that a couple of the roommates that rented the old house just off-campus were hard-core survivalists at heart, and had land in the wilds of Pennsylvania where they established an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it camp.

  It was the self-same camp where he was heading now. He pulled the car out of the parking garage and stopped at the curb. The traffic was bumper to bumper as a long line of cars waited for the light on the corner to change. There was as many cars crossing the intersection as were waiting on his side, but everyone still stopped for red lights. That wouldn’t last long.

  The SUV a few cars down the street waved him in, he waited until the car in front of that one cleared and he waved a thank you for the consideration. Someone laid on the horn. Consideration wouldn’t last too long either. That would be the first thing to fall before the savage act of survival. Finn began to wonder how long before it would already be too late.

  He too was caught at the light, waiting while cars streamed past him all heading for the freeway. Vehicles going in the other direction were sparse, but so far everyone still had a short leash on their tempers. Finn wondered how it was for his friends, and whether they were having any trouble. Right now, things looked like a fairly normal rush hour. Everything status quo, with some random blackouts. It wasn’t unusual to lose power during high AC use in the summer. So far no one seemed to be putting this together with the fact that it really wasn’t excessively hot out today.

  While stopped, he hit redial on his phone. Again the short staccato beat of the error signal blared in his ear. He tossed the phone aside and turned on the radio. Two DJs were laughing at the people trying to run from the city, great fools who panicked at the drop of a…

  The radio went dead at the same time as the street light. Stoplights began flashing red in every direction.

  The façade of civility broke open. The festering anger and fear rose to the surface as cars charged the intersection, barely missing each other, horns slamming each other as each one took the law into his own hands and forced its way past the rest.

  Finn gunned the car and waited for the pickup beside him to make his move. The pickup was turning left; most of the traffic was heading that way. It was the most direct route to the freeway. Finn decided to cross the intersection and look for a clearer route with less chaos.

  The car behind him collided with a Jeep going the other way. The intersection was now effectively clogged and impassible. Finn realized it was going to remain like this for the foreseeable future and could see a line of brake lights ahead. The stoplight there was flashing too.

  He pulled off in a side street filled with little unassuming houses with tiny front yards. Each house seemed to have a single designated tree growing in the middle of the yard. He saw that most of the houses were dark, likely lit up with flashlights and candles. A soft handheld light moved across the living room of a house near him, another beam across the street at the house there, the sudden brightness drawing his eyes. He hoped it was the homeowners and not burglary on a grand scale.

  He pulled out his phone and got to a map application. It was surprising that the service was still in operation. The internet was still tied into national defense. Maybe not the way it was when it began all those years ago, but it was still a vital national service.

  So while GPS was also an important function and would be kept on under all possible circumstances, the phone service to access them was expendable. If the servers went down, maps would not be able to be reloaded. It was a chilling question – how many people would become helpless, with no paper maps in their possession to guide them?

  The military certainly didn’t care if a civilian phone company lost its unlimited data plan, they had their own access. Up until a few hours ago, Finn could have tapped into that unlimited pool of connectivity too, but his access had been taken from him as soon as Robert could get to a terminal.

  He found his way to a possible exit from the city by tracing his way like working a maze in a magazine kid’s page. He started with a spot far from where he was and worked backward, staying with side streets as much as he could. There were still some areas where he would be forced to use the major roads, even some places where he would have to face large intersections. With the power down, that was going to get worse and worse.

  He pulled back to the road he’d just left and turned right. Just before he got to the stalled traffic at the light, he pulled in front of traffic and slipped down a darkened side street.

  It twisted and turned and vomited out behind a strip mall where he paused to get his bearings. A sound of shattered glass and a muffled scream decided for him that remaining in that place wasn’t healthy. The looting had begun.

  He gunned it, crossing a four-lane road between cars that honked and drivers who swore at him, but didn’t swerve or slow down. If he was going to get in front of them they were going to ram him for his trouble. It didn’t matter if they were killed, or he was killed, getting out was all that mattered now.

  He focused on the problem. It was a technique he’d developed when when working for the military and having to work with people that didn’t like answering to a civilian, or having to treat someone with the same respect a military man would have earned the hard way.

  Focus on the problem. Make the issue the issue. Concentrate on the solvable.

  He spun through a grade school intersection and took an alley over to the next street. He was one lone car whipping through the residential area and making good progress. He still stopped at stop signs, even though everyone seemed to be either cowering in their homes waiting for the sun to come and bring light and heat again, or were on the major roads trying to run from the darkness. That was a line of civility that he refused to cross.

  Problem. Person or persons had hijacked the power grid of every major world power. Who would have done it, even why at this point wasn’t his problem. He wasn’t a cop or spy or FBI agent. He was a computer genius. All his professors had said so, in so many terms. The write up in Newsweek had listed him as “super geek.”

  Finn never felt less smart in his life. Whoever it was, they’d gotten around him. They’d figured out how to bypass every trap and barrier he’d come up with after three years and blown by it like it wasn’t even there.

  Focus. He spun down a two-lane road. It was unavoidable, but the traffic here seemed to be lighter. It occurred to him that it might be because the looting was a little more
widespread here. Two men went by balancing a monster TV on their shoulders. How were they even going to use it? There were shots being fired and occasional screams like something from a bad movie.

  But no sirens.

  In these neighborhoods, for the duration of the night, each man would be on his own. Whatever he could protect was protected, and whatever he could take was his. Finn gave an unconscious nod to the men and women who were staying in their houses with weapons trained on the doors and children hiding behind them.

  Focus. How do you take down an electrical grid? Honestly, it wasn’t really all that hard. The real question was, how does a grid actually stay up and running? The equipment was antiquated, poorly maintained and constantly on the verge of failing. It wasn’t that long ago that most of Oregon and Washington and Northern California went black for days because of heavy snow on a tree that snapped a power line in the Oregon woods.

  He drove over a bridge and came to a dead end. He sat in the car looking at the freeway just ahead of him. The traffic was still flowing there; if not fast, it was still moving at least. There was a road in front of him that lead to an onramp, and there was no one on that particular road at all. There was a simple reason why. Between him and where he needed to be, was a new construction site. AFFORDABLE APARTMENTS was written on the large sign. Heavy equipment and stacks of lumber dotted the site. All behind locked gates.

  Finn looked in his rearview and saw a shadow moving against the moonlight. Another. Like dark wolves seeking a victim, these were on two legs and at least one of them carried something in his arms, held the way people held guns in movies.

  Civilization was dead. Finn gunned the motor and ran the gate. If he was stopped, if the sign or gate caught under his tires, he was dead and all his hoarding would revert to the animals of the new jungle. He slammed the gate in the middle and it burst open.

  He heard shots and drove faster. He was heading for the open road and trying to get there before he got a tire shot out, or he ran over something that would slash the rubber or tear the bottom out of the car.