Fallen Earth | Book 2 | Aftermath

by Morrow, Jason D.

  Because of the nature of what Sam had discovered about the Horsemen weeks ago, he knew he would likely need a backup of all the documentation he had collected. He had backed up the documents onto a hard drive and then backed those documents onto another hard drive, which he then backed up to an air-gapped laptop that he now had stored away in a Faraday cage under his bed in his tiny apartment. Of course, the laptop was probably no longer considered air-gapped since it had been connected to a hard drive that had been connected to a computer that had been connected to the internet. A true air-gapped computer would have no connection to the outside world in any capacity, but Sam was willing to go this far considering the circumstances.

  His Faraday cage was little more than a metal box lined with aluminum foil. It was only large enough to carry the laptop, a couple of thumb drives, SD cards, a cell phone, and an LED flashlight.

  He was pleased to discover that the cage had worked and that his equipment fired up with no problem. As for the cell phone, he could turn it on, but doing so didn’t help him because the cell towers were down. He had hoped there would still be GPS capabilities even without data, but it seemed location services were also gone. That left him with the computer and a couple of storage drives.

  It had been two days since the lights went out. Two days since Blackleaf said: “We are narrowing in on you. Though the lights may go out, we know you aren’t far away.”

  Sam knew Blackleaf was just trying to get under his skin—to scare him. But the message carried the weight of truth to it as well. Blackleaf had proven that he was on the side of the Horsemen because he had essentially warned Sam that the attack was happening. Within minutes of the message, the lights went out and the world went dark.

  Sam spent the next two days driving himself crazy. He had taken all his information and dumped it onto every storage device he had on the air-gapped computer. From thumb drives to SD cards, everything had documentation on it. This would give him a chance to find some answers later. There were so many documents that he could spend years sifting through them and find nothing, but he knew it was all there. It had to be. If it wasn’t all there, Blackleaf wouldn’t have been so concerned with meeting Sam and trying to take him out. And it seemed he was interested in coming after him even after the attack.

  Sam tried to think about how he had gotten involved with Blackleaf and soon realized that he was the fourth of the five-member group to join them. The first three—Knuckles, Astrid, and Hubbs—were the ones who had gotten in deep. They had already discovered the Horsemen when Blackleaf joined them. Weasel came in last and had been the first to be taken out, which made sense. He hadn’t been as established in the group, yet he probably still knew too much. It also made sense that Blackleaf had come in later to infiltrate the group because of what they had found out. They should’ve been more careful. They should’ve covered their tracks better.

  Sam looked around his studio apartment and wondered how long he would be able to stay here. The walls seemed to be closing in around him, the apartment feeling smaller and smaller by the hour. It never felt so small when he was connected to the outside world (even if only on a screen), but with nothing to do and no connection to anyone, he felt like he was trapped in solitary confinement. He had only gone out once in the last two days, and the apocalyptic view of the Chicago streets was almost too much for him to handle. He was probably the only person within a reasonable distance that had any idea what was happening.

  Other than storing his electronics in a Faraday cage, he hadn’t prepared for this. He hadn’t stocked up on water or food like he probably should have. Until recently, hacking had never been a serious pursuit for him. It had been an extension of his online gaming, in a way. It had been something fun to do with his friends in his spare time. And somehow it had ballooned into discovering a catastrophic attack against everyone in America.

  Blackleaf was still after him, he knew, but what was he supposed to do about it? Obviously, Blackleaf didn’t know where he was because he hadn’t come storming through Sam’s apartment yet. Sam wondered if he was still a priority considering the attack had already happened. It wasn’t as though he could go public with the information if there was no internet access or radio towers or television stations able to broadcast the information to everyone who may be listening or watching. That said, an attack like this couldn’t be perfect, and not every city or town was going to be affected the way Chicago was. For all he knew, it might only be the Midwest that felt the effects of the attack. The entire West Coast or even the entire East Coast could be perfectly fine. Of course, any major metropolitan city would know what had happened to Chicago or any of the other major cities affected simply because of commerce. If businesses were not able to connect with each other, they would know something was wrong. However, it had been two days and there were no soldiers, no police officers, no rescue teams. To Sam, that meant the problem was far more widespread than he would like. It meant that other cities were experiencing the same kind of phenomenon. If it were only Chicago, help would have been sent, and it would’ve already been here.

  The riots began happening sooner than Sam expected they would. He wasn’t in the best neighborhood in Chicago, but it wasn’t the worst, either. Still, he had been able to hear shattering glass and screams throughout the night as looters and rioters stole the streets. He knew he was going to have to get out of here quickly, but he wasn’t sure where he needed to go. He didn’t have family, and he didn’t have friends he could turn to. All he could do was pack a bag and leave. He was the person with the most knowledge about what was going on, yet he was probably one of the least prepared people for such an attack. It wasn’t his physical ability he was worried about, because Sam was in pretty good shape and took care of himself; rather, it was the lack of ability to survive without any use of technology. He suspected most people, particularly in a large city like Chicago, would be in the same boat. That wasn’t comforting knowledge. All it really meant was that more people were going to die.

  He didn’t know of any safeguards that the government had in place in the event of an EMP. But so far, two days in, it didn’t seem like anyone was prepared. The lights were still out, the power was still off, and the streets were chaos.

  He looked down at his backpack and shook his head. There were a few granola bars, a couple of bottles of water, his computer, and an SD card encased in a plastic cover. Each of the electronic devices carried all the information he had about the Horseman, even though he had no idea what he would do with them. The food and water would last him maybe the rest of the day. Sam didn’t own a gun, so there was very little chance of him being able to defend himself. His best option was to lie low and remain as inconspicuous as possible.

  He spent some time carving out a small square between the sole of his shoe and the toes, and he stuck the SD card in it. So long as his feet didn’t get submerged in water, it would probably remain safe.

  He stared out his apartment window where he could see the streets below. He tapped his toe against the floor and his breathing rapidly increased. The rioting had lasted through the night and was still happening. There were protesters, but who were they protesting? There didn’t seem to be anyone to hear their cries of anger. Looters should have been going after the proper supplies, but they were going after shoe stores and electronics stores, essentially declaring that they had no idea what was going on either. They just wanted some free stuff during the chaos. Sam would have laughed at the man who was carrying a stolen television out of one of the stores if he didn’t feel so horrified.

  He put on his backpack, thinking it would be a terrible idea to be separated from it, then left his apartment and made his way down the hallway. The woman who had talked to him outside the garbage chute the other night sat slumped against her apartment door. Her eyes were red and puffy, and she wiped her nose with her oversized hoodie when she looked up at him.

  “Can’t get ahold of nobody,” she said. “You have any luck?”

&nb
sp; Sam took a deep breath and shook his head. “No.”

  “I haven’t been able to go to work for two days,” she said, looking down at the floor. “If this keeps up, I’m not gonna make rent.”

  Sam looked behind him, then to his sides. He just knew Blackleaf would be there to jump him at any moment. He cracked his neck to the side and then bent down in front of the woman. “You don’t need to be worried about making rent right now.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide and wet. “Huh?”

  “Do you have food?”

  “A little.”

  “Water?”

  She shook her head as a tear slipped down the side of her cheek.

  Sam pulled his backpack around, unzipped the top, and produced one of his two bottles of water. He handed it to her.

  She took it with two hands, cradling it.

  “Don’t drink it all at once,” Sam said. “And when you can, try to get more. And stop worrying about rent. Nobody’s paying rent this month.”

  The woman’s eyebrows curled. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, there are bigger things to worry about,” he said. “I know you’re mad at him, but do you think your boyfriend will have food and water?”

  She shrugged. “I turned off my phone the other night. Woke up, and I couldn’t get it to work.” Her voice cracked. “I haven’t talked to him since I hung up on him.” She snarled as her back teeth ground against each other, and she pressed a fist against the side of her head.

  Sam almost reached out to pat her on the shoulder, but he held back. They were all on their own now. And things were going to get worse. Much worse.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “Maybe you should go find him?”

  “He’s five stops away, and El is down,” she said.

  Sam nodded. He didn’t want to give her false hope and tell her that all this might take care of itself soon. It wouldn’t. And if she didn’t move, she would be here without food and water, and there was a decent chance she would die unprepared and unmotivated as she was.

  “Try to get more water,” Sam repeated as he made his way toward the exit stairwell.

  The woman didn’t answer and didn’t look up, but Sam could hear her sobbing even from a full floor down.

  A cold bit at his hands and cheeks when he exited to the sidewalk outside the apartment building. He paused when the door closed behind him. Across the street he saw a group of people carrying baseball bats and crowbars. One of them reared back and smashed the window of a coffee shop. None of them even attempted to go into the store and raid the cash register. They were just here for the destruction. This kind of environment was dangerous. People did crazy things when law and order was gone—when there was no one to police them.

  Sam clung to his backpack straps and looked up the street to his left, then his stomach sank. A rumbling noise filled the air, and a voice came out over a loudspeaker.

  “Remain in your homes. No one is permitted to leave. Violators have thirty minutes to get back into their homes or we will have to use force.”

  It wasn’t the only tank in view. When Sam looked in the other direction, he saw another one, this time with soldiers marching in front of it carrying rifles. These weren’t the police, and those weren’t guns with rubber bullets.

  Sam backed slowly toward his apartment door and opened it. Before he retreated back into the building, he studied both sides of the street and the soldiers walking toward him. They had made no declaration that they were United States military. He also wasn’t sure how there were functioning tanks crawling along the streets when everyone else’s vehicles were disabled.

  Could they be the Horsemen? Were they here just for him?

  Sam tried to shake the thought from his mind and went back into his apartment building. The rumbling of the tanks grew louder, the man on the loudspeaker more shrill.

  As much as he wanted the thought to leave him, it wouldn’t. Blackleaf had said they knew where he was.

  They didn’t want anyone out there knowing who was behind the attack.

  Sam had to find a way out of the city.

  Chapter Six

  Screaming. So much screaming. The voices echoed in the streets. Sometimes there were gunshots, then screaming. Sometimes there were large fireballs that lit up the entire street, then more screaming.

  Cora was on the tenth floor of her apartment building, and the water wasn’t running. She had used up all of her bottled water. The last time she had ventured out of her apartment, she got to the fifth floor and saw a group of people breaking down doors, stealing everything they could. When she saw one of them fire a gun into an apartment blindly, she ran back upstairs, locked her door, and shoved her couch against it.

  Cora didn’t have a gun. She didn’t have any way to defend herself in a city that was tearing itself apart. Now she didn’t even have water.

  She thought of her dad and her sister. She wondered how they were doing in all this. She hadn’t talked to either of them in days, and she knew they would be worried about her.

  She had a kitchen knife, a backpack with a blanket, and a few snacks. It wasn’t enough, but it was all she had.

  She pulled the couch away from the door and unlocked it.

  Cora had to get out of Chicago. She didn’t know how she was going to do it considering she was deep in the middle of the city, but she had to try.

  But first, she had to get water.

  The kitchen knife wasn’t anything special, but it would do the job if someone got too close to her.

  She knew she shouldn’t go out in the streets, but she didn’t have any other choice. The need for water was too great. She had some money with her, but she didn’t expect to be able to pay for anything. There were screams in the streets and loud gunfire in the distance. This part of Chicago was turning into a war zone, and she wasn’t even sure what the fight was about. She had heard of things like this before, where people started rioting in the streets during a natural disaster. Was this a natural disaster? Was this from some kind of solar flare? Was it an attack? These questions formed in her head again and again. All she could think about was what the next day would look like and how her family up in Hope, Wisconsin was doing. They were probably in a lot less danger than she was. Hope was a quiet, close-knit town and the people probably weren’t attacking each other over basic necessities.

  All she needed was to find a drugstore or convenience store where there would be bottles of water or sports drinks to hold her over. Getting out of the city didn’t seem reasonable on foot. Not from here. If she were to head north toward her family, it would take days just to get to the other side of Chicago. The city was a big place, and greater Chicago covered a lot of ground. If she were to get to Hope on foot, that would take over a week, and she wasn’t entirely sure she could navigate her way there. That didn’t even account for safety. With the gunshots and looters throughout the neighborhood, she would be lucky to make it across the street.

  The morning air hit her and she felt cold. She couldn’t ignore the voices over the loudspeakers in the distance, yelling for people to go back into their homes.

  She wasn’t ready for the chaos in the streets when she saw it. Men and women smashing things, groups of them flipping over cars. One of the buildings across the street was consumed by flames. Other than the loudspeaker in the distance, there were no sounds of emergency relief. No sirens. No helicopters.

  She couldn’t find the source of the screams. They seemed to bleed out into the streets from various windows and apartment buildings. She didn’t even want to think about what was happening to some people.

  Cora knew of a drugstore at the end of her block, and that was her aim. As she walked, she kept her head down and clutched the knife to her chest so as to keep it inconspicuous but ready. No one was paying her any attention yet, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t spot her soon. She tried to think about when the rioting had started. It wasn’t the first day that the power went out. It had happened sometim
e in the middle of the night. She didn’t have a working clock but she had barely slept, so she would have guessed it was about one in the morning when she heard the first crash and screams in the streets.

  So, the looting and rioting had been going on for a solid six hours at least. That made her wonder if the drugstore was already looted to the bare shelves or if anyone had thought to go for the water yet.

  Glass on the sidewalk in front of the drugstore was the first sign of looting, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any water left. Every couple of seconds she saw someone going in or coming out, usually carrying something too big to handle without a struggle. As she neared the drugstore, a large man stumbled out of the shattered glass opening with a mini-fridge in his arms. Their eyes met for a brief moment, but the man just turned from her and nearly fell forward as he trotted away.

  Cora looked into the dark opening of the drugstore. There were several people inside shuffling through what remained. Cora’s eyes went straight to the back glass doors where the coolers were, but it was too dark to see anything clearly.

  She took a deep breath and stepped inside. She knew this wasn’t a moment to be timid. She should have been acting like every other looter, running in to go after whatever she needed or wanted, then running out like someone was trying to get her. Instead, her legs moved like she was waist-deep in mud, and her mind screamed for her to turn back. Her dry tongue urged her forward, though, begging her for even just a cap-full of water.

  Shelves were toppled. Any items of value had been taken, and the back section of the store where all the prescription drugs were kept was wide open with nothing left but overturned shelves and empty boxes.

  When she finally got to the coolers, the story was the same. All the bottled water, sports drinks, and soft drinks were gone, the shelves completely empty but for one with melted ice cream dripping to the floor.

  Cora watched the cooler in front of her as though she were trying to wake up from a terrible nightmare. She had thought there would have been something left for her to take. Even just a single bottle of water would have given her a glimmer of hope.