4
June 13, 2033
Seattle, Washington, USA
70th floor, Illeni Building
65°F
1202 Hours
My job is deceptively simple. I stare at images taken from satellites and determine what they contain. AI has started taking over the field, but the human eye is still the most perceptive thing mankind has yet to produce.
Everybody was strangely friendly. I noticed it the first day and wrote it off as being the new guy. When it hadn’t worn off after a full month, I talked to Jessie about it. She said she was handed a list by the owners of the company and given free rein to pick her team.
The result was a strange mixture, but in the two years I had been working in the office, I had never seen anything beyond someone stress shouting. And in that one instance, they had been calmed down with tea. I had never worked in an environment like that before.
Eventually, Eddie reminded me we needed to eat. We rode the elevator down, and grabbed lunch. We shared stories, laughed, and enjoyed the hour. As we gathered up to return to the office, I noticed the streets outside the lunch room were bathed in shadow.
“Hey Lin, was a solar eclipse supposed to happen today or something?”
She shook her head. “The next one is in September. Won’t even be visible, it’s for South America. We did have one back in March... that’s weird. It looks like a solar eclipse.”
As we waited for the elevator, I could see frost gathering on corners of the glass in the windows. It had been nearly a hundred degrees outside when I got to work. Some of the windows made cracking sounds.
“Holy fuck. That's way too fast. There's no way it should be below freezing. Lin,” I waved my hand behind me, trying to snag Linda’s attention without looking away.
“Wh-what Dante? Geez, stop flailing about, you’ll put someone’s eye out...”
Linda finally looked north through the windows and saw the frost as well.
“What the fuh...” she mumbled. I snapped out of it and looked down at Eddie, who was looking pale. I looked back to Linda and shook my head.
“Lin, we need to get back up to the office. I’m sure this is exactly what Jessie wanted to talk to us about.”
Eddie started pulling on his mom’s arm. “Mom? Mom! What’s going on? Why is it so dark outside?”
His outburst started drawing attention from the people left waiting for the next round of elevators. I turned Linda and Eddie toward the elevators and put a hand on each of their shoulders.
I guided them through the crowd and grabbed the first open elevator. We stepped inside and I hit ‘70’. The doors shut and the elevator lurched upward.
5
June 13, 2033
Seattle, Washington, USA
70th floor, Illeni Building
30°F
1305 Hours
The doors of the elevator slid open. We stepped into the foyer, and angled over to the office door. I slid my keycard and the door lock clicked.
I nudged it open, to find everybody clustered at the windows. It seemed pretty evenly split between the north and south facing windows. Quiet murmuring carried through the crowds.
The atmosphere was tense. So, when Jessie stepped out of her office and began to shout, everybody jumped.
“ATTENTION EVERYONE! Thank you all for making it in on this admittedly strange day.” Jessie’s strong voice rang out across the office.
When the words sank in, almost as one, everybody glanced back outside at the darkness that was descending. The north facing windows had begun to frost over as well. The last rays of sunlight rippled through gathering clouds to the south. Jessie spoke up again.
“This is going to sound strange, but I’m going to need everybody to go into the server room. Once we have everybody gathered in there, I’ll give you more information. Please make yourselves comfortable in there.”
Then she turned and looked for specific individuals in the crowds. “Dante, can you come here? Larry, Brandon, I’ll need you two to wait outside my office for a minute.”
I nodded, then turned to Linda and Eddie and told them to go ahead. I walked over to Jessie and she led the way into her office. The door clicked shut, and she hustled over to a painting on the south wall of her office. Frost glittered on the windows.
“Jessie, what the fuck is going on?” I said through clenched teeth.
“I don't fucking know. We had some information, but it was clearly wrong.” She slid the painting aside to reveal a recessed keypad. She punched in a series of numbers and something clicked in the wall behind her desk.
“Help me move the desk out of the way. Remember Project HORUS? Well, this is that.”
She grabbed one side of the desk and I grabbed the other. We shoved the desk out of the walkway that was formed between the door to her office and the new door that had slid open at the back.
She walked to her office door and cracked it open. I saw her wave Brandon and Larry in. Larry was a massive guy at six-nine, making Brandon’s six-three look small. He subconsciously had to duck his head when walking through the door.
“Guys, this is a storeroom I had made for this event. Inside we have all sorts of supplies, but right now, we don’t have a ton of time. We need to get the plastic tubs at the front out and over to the server room. I’ll answer your questions later, we need this done—” she looked out the window here.
“Right fucking now. We are out of time. It’s happening faster than predicted.”
“Hold the fuck up. You knew about this? You prepared,” I asked in an agitated tone.
“Not this exactly, Dante. There's a fuckton of supplies in the storage room. We tried to brainstorm anything and everything. So yes, there's cold weather gear. But there's also extreme heat gear, which will be useless. Now, can we get some of this shit before we die?”
“Two more questions.” I looked to Larry and Brandon. They nodded in support.
“Fuck! Fine, what?!”
“How are we supposed to be safe 70 floors up, and why is it already below freezing outside?”
“For the first part, because the core of the building is reinforced with new experimental materials. Should stand up to just about anything short of a nuclear bomb. Windows are treated the same way. This is basically a bomb shelter with a view- which is essentially what we're supposed to be. For the second, I don't know. Physics says we should have days before it falls below freezing to the point where it's dangerous. Must be fucking magic. Now, can we please just get this shit out of storage?”
I nodded, getting focused. I stepped through the secret door with Brandon and Larry following. That's when we discovered where all the rest of the room had gone.
Behind the back wall of Jessie’s office was a large storage room. Shelves stood on the walls, and in the middle of the room. The space was far larger than just what was missing from her office. It clearly took up a significant portion of the office across the lobby.
Boxes were neatly lined from floor to ceiling with enough room to walk around. The plastic tubs Jessie had mentioned were stacked four high and two deep just inside the door. I grabbed the first one with some effort and handed it out the door to Brandon.
He handed it to Larry who walked it out of the office. When I turned back, the box immediately behind the stack of tubs was visible.
It had ‘MRE’ stenciled on the side. My blood turned to ice in my veins. This had been well prepared for.
I shook myself out of my concern and continued handing tubs out until they were all in the office. Brandon and Larry shuttled them over to the airlock.
Once we had them all stacked inside the airlock, we cycled in. Everybody else had already made it into the room, which had cool dry air and was filled with concerned chatter.
As we cycled in, the conversations sputtered and died. Everybody turned their gaze to Jessie.
Larry, Brandon, and I moved the tubs into the main chamber, and the doors whispered shut. We started opening them to hand
out the prepared kits inside.
Each tub held cardboard boxes stacked two wide, two long, and two deep. The boxes were decently sized and barely fit inside the tub, which made pulling the first box out a pain.
We quickly handed out the boxes, one for every person in the room. Questions rang out but were hard to understand over the tearing of cardboard. We quickly learned what was inside each box.
The first box was ripped open and a jacket puffed out. After the jacket was removed, we saw a tightly bundled pair of unisex one size long johns, a pair of mittens, a beanie, and a toiletries bag.
People rapidly began donning the new clothing, even though the room had started to warm a little from the presence of so many.
Someone near me spilled the contents of the toiletries bag and revealed lip balm, a pair of chemical hand warmer packets, a small silver package with plastic on it, small nail clippers, a pre-packaged toothbrush and toothpaste, two bottles of water, and a few protein bars.
The noise was immense as everybody began to unpack their care boxes. Linda stood and helped hand out boxes as I unpacked them and Brandon stacked the empty tubs off to the side.
I spoke aside to Jessie a moment later.
“Where is the water? We're going to need a lot more water.”
“There's some in the storage room. Enough to last this group a week. We're going to need to find more,” she whispered back to me.
Larry went around collecting the broken down boxes and trash as everybody settled in. Once everybody had begun to settle, Jessie stood and walked back to the entry to address everybody. Questions immediately began to fly, but Jessie raised a hand and waited until silence fell once more.
“Hold on, folks. I know this is strange, but if you look outside, you’ll see that the day is even stranger.”
Anybody who could look out through the airlock, did so. The lights were still on, providing a strange view of a normal office. However, there was no life, and certainly no warmth to be seen.
Ice glittered on every metal surface. Glass had frost creating whorls and stars. The outer airlock doors began to frost as we watched.
The lights beyond the server room guttered, dimming with power surges. Then the power went out, and gasps could be heard. However, the lights were still on in the server room. The fans still whirred away, pumping fresh air in and taking stale air out.
Jessie continued after a moment. “The world is experiencing a cataclysmic event.” A shudder shook the building as if to punctuate her words.
“Windstorms are starting across the entire globe. The sun has not set, since it’s still only about two in the afternoon. About three and a half years ago, something was discovered via deep space observation. An object that wasn’t visible on any spectrum was determined to be leaving a star system that had recently undergone some sort of event. The star was blocked by this object. It hasn’t been visible since. The object continually gained in size, though never seemed to deviate. We don’t know exactly what this object is, but it has clearly blocked the Sun from the Earth.” I looked at Jessie.
She was avoiding my eyes. She wasn’t telling the truth. At least, not all of it.
Then she continued. “As a result, we were not sure what to do. Groups were formed. We are actually part of one of those groups. Budgets were approved in record time. Then projections started to be released. All of our plans were scrapped. That’s why we had that ‘meltdown’ two months back.” She let the revelation sink in for a moment.
“This shelter had to be built. During the day the server room was constructed, and at night my office was renovated to have a secret storage room behind it. Our windows were designed to be bomb proof from the start, along with the core of the building. We’ll shake, but we should weather just about anything shy of a direct missile strike. The storage room was stocked over the last few weeks at night. We have supplies to make our office comfortable, and food enough for us to last three weeks up here.”
“THREE WEEKS?!” someone shouted from the other end of the room. “I have family out there! Pets! An actual home...” they drifted off as the realization set in. Everybody was suddenly on the verge of panic. I looked out through the airlock again, as many others had.
Ice sat so thick on the outer airlock door that we couldn’t see through it anymore. Temperatures had fallen a ridiculous amount in the last two hours. It seemed to defy physics.
Because it does.
I shook my head to clear the strange voice. I looked around, but nobody was reacting. I looked at Linda, who had sat next to me after we finished passing out the boxes. She looked back at me, miserable and sad. I’m sure I looked the same way.
Spike and Buster were at home. They were over an hour away by road, and with the cold setting in like this... people were surely already dying. My pets were going to be dead before I could ever get close. What the fuck could we do about any of this?
Survive.
I looked around again. Nothing. The strange voice had spoken twice inside my head. That much was clear, because nobody else heard it. Nobody reacting to anything but Jessie’s news. People were crying.
Lives were ending in the cold dark, and with surprising violence. We sat warm and safe as our families, our fathers, and mothers, and sisters, and brothers, and pets, and everybody and everything we knew... died.
It was crushing. I felt numb. Most of my family had already died. But I could feel the sorrow choking the room. Everybody was losing someone as we sat relatively warm and safe.
I was a single child and my parents had passed some years before. Spike and Buster were all that I had left. The day had started rough, but who would ever think a hangover would be the best part of a day?
Jessie nodded slowly, drawing attention back to her.
“I’m sorry to say this. Unless they were already chosen or close to one of the shelters, they don’t have much of a chance. The temperatures are falling. Far quicker than they should have, in fact. We should have had a full day before the frost set in. Remember that eclipse we had a few months ago? In the shadow, especially in full shadow, temperatures drop rapidly. This is worse. Nowhere on Earth has any sun. It’s not like transitioning to night.” Like an ongoing trainwreck, all eyes stayed glued to the doors covered in frost.
“The sudden loss of light and heat, the heat that was keeping our world livable, is going to cause massive temperature differentials. The streets are going to flood from tsunamis, and windstorms are going to tear apart the land. The oceans are going to remain warm for maybe a few days, which will cause the rapidly cooling earth to send high pressure out toward the coast. There’s going to be global storms unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. The world as we knew it is dead, as of an hour ago.”
Someone began to shout. “What are we going to do? What’s the point in staying alive if the whole fucking world is dead?!” People were now crying openly.
Kids were quietly sobbing as they began to realize that maybe they would never see their homes, their pets, maybe their other parent ever again.
Jessie looked like she was choking back tears too. I finally understood why she had refused to join us at work socials, why she never dated. She cleared her throat, and continued.
“In a little bit, I’ll be going back to my office with a few volunteers to grab supplies. We’re limited to this room for now, because it is WAY too cold to survive out there.” She waved her hand at the airlock, accidentally triggering the door. A gust of cold air washed in, chilling those of us closer to the doors.
She stepped away from the doors, and I could see the tiny hairs on her arms standing up from the cold.
“We’re going to expand our living area first. I’m not sure how, but we can’t all be crammed in here all the time. And we definitely need access to the bathrooms. We’ll have to be careful of our air though, since we only have the one exchanger in here. I think there’s another in each of the bathrooms. After we’ve expanded into the office, we’ll start searching for survivors and supp
lies. Our first trip will likely be down to the megamart on the ground floor. That won’t be for a day or two. And remember, there’s no power in the building in general, so that’s seventy flights of stairs.”
I stood as Jessie donned her jacket. Geno, a beefy guy with graying hair and a chest like a barrel stood too. Brandon and Larry walked up. She looked at the four of us.
I took the lead. “What can we do to help?”
6
June 13, 2033
Seattle, Washington, USA
70th floor, Illeni Building
7°F
1507 Hours
The air was absolutely frigid. It hit my face like a million little knives, cutting cold straight to the bone. I couldn’t believe the glass hadn’t shattered from the rapid change in temperature.
The five of us jogged to the storage room. I immediately started grabbing boxes. Each was labeled, which made finding the necessary supplies easy.
Even with gloves and a beanie on, my exposed skin started to go numb. My nose started to run and ache, and my throat felt raw from the chilly air. I quickly worked up a sweat as I moved boxes along the human chain we established.
We moved a few crates of MREs out into the main office, then found boxes with additional heavy jackets and sleeping bags. As the guys started carting those boxes into the server room, I started taking stock.
We had boxes with hundreds of yards of heavy plastic sheeting, duct tape, staple guns, some industrial batteries, portable heaters. We had a lot of stuff, and it seemed that whoever had ordered the stock had anticipated cold.
Behind the cold gear was a series of boxes that were relatively useless. High SPF sun block, fans, misters, and other trinkets to help deal with high temperatures. Off to one side sat a single box with extreme cold gear. It had multiple layers of clothing designed to deal with sub-zero temperatures. It only held enough for six people to be fully outfitted.
Winds of Darkness Page 3
