“Hogwash. I don’t think they’d do that. They’d want us prepared, so we don’t contribute to a crisis, right? The more we can care for ourselves, the less stretched FEMA’s resources would be if the fringe loonies are right.”
Mary looked away from traffic to gaze at Christine. Her slightly raspy voice dropped a bit as she replied, “Our government has always done that. Chicago ahead of that one epidemic, telling everyone not to worry so the wealthy could escape unhindered. Or testing nukes and vaccines on Army soldiers without informing them or getting their consent. Going door-to-door during Katrina to confiscate firearms from law-abiding people while armed looters prowled around without anyone trying to stop them. And that list goes on and on.”
Christine’s shoulders twitched as the realization that Mary was right about her list of horrible things done in the name of national defense. But that was a long time ago… “Times have changed, Mary. No one would tolerate that anymore, not now. Not in the Internet Era… Or hadn’t you noticed?”
Mary smiled, but it wasn’t a happy expression. “Times may have changed—maybe—but people haven’t.”
Christine wasn’t sure how to reply, but the silence was filled with troubling thoughts.
Mary, ever the one to fill the silence, finally said, “But anyways. My brother is in the Army, and he got called back from his vacation in Europe. He said that everyone he knows on active duty has been called back to base, and that after the governor canceled his own vacation, he disappeared to some Pennsylvania bunker.”
Christine frowned. That sure didn’t sound like a rational response to what the news was telling people… But no, it wasn’t possible. The government would at least have FEMA on alert, just in case, and surely Mary’s brother’s unit got recalled just as a precaution. And there was no way the governor had skipped town.
“You know how people like to gossip,” Christine said, trying to keep her voice light. “The governor is no doubt just being cautious, and he’s probably sitting in his fat-cat mansion right now, not in some stark cement bunker—that’s ridiculous on the face of it.”
“Maybe. But even if he’s just in his mansion, that doesn’t change the fact that my brother got recalled to base for this.”
Just then, Christine noticed the off-ramp that led down into LoDo—lower downtown Denver—was clear. Traffic on the freeway had ground to a halt again, but plenty of big surface streets could take her to Aurora. Decision made, she edged her car out onto the shoulder just enough to get around the one stopped in front of her, and then headed into lower downtown.
There were surprisingly few vehicles on the surface streets, especially for a Thursday morning. “Heck yeah.” This was going to be easier than she’d thought, and she congratulated herself on making such a smart choice.
Mary’s gasp drew Christine’s attention, and she followed her passenger’s gaze to the right. There, just down a side street, a convenience store stood with a broken-out window as two men in masks came out carrying boxes and ran.
But only half a block away, at a bank, sat two Denver PD squad cars and an ambulance. The cops were so busy talking to a small crowd of people out front that they must not have seen the store getting robbed, or at least, they did nothing to stop it.
Mary rapid-fired words in a high-pitched voice fraught with tension. “Christine, let’s go back. This is just Denver. Aurora will be ten times worse. Please? You can go be a paralegal again tomorrow, after the cops make things safe again.”
Christine’s eyes were painfully wide as she stared at the bits of chaos in LoDo, and she realized Mary had been right about one thing—Aurora would be worse.
Thoughts of her kids struck her, then. Their school was only about eight blocks away. As the light turned green, she whipped the car around the corner—but down that four-lane road, she saw only a dozen cars between herself and West Colefax.
What the hell was going on?
“Yeah, okay. We’ll go get my kids and head home, just to be safe. They’ll be happy to play hooky for a day.”
She only hoped that, on the way home, her kids wouldn’t have to see any scenes like the robberies she’d just seen.
Two people fighting tumbled into the road, forcing her to swerve to avoid hitting them. She pressed the gas pedal down harder, then sped through a red light at the empty intersection. Traffic tickets be damned.
4
Friday, May 29th
William “Wiley” Johnson sat in the back of the van, staring through barred windows. But the view out of his window was nice. Pretty. A panorama of the scrub-filled highlands, interspersed with the occasional big, green farm nestled among all the browns and grays. Traffic going that direction was light for a Friday, which improved his view.
A glance through the window on the other side, though, showed what looked like half of Denver heading east, out of town.
Wiley sat alone, which was just how he liked it. It didn’t bother him at all that no one wanted to sit next to him. Who’d want to sit beside a serial killer?
Especially since the news had so gleefully sensationalized his victims’ gruesome end…
Unfortunately, one of the men sitting two rows up just wouldn’t shut up. He yammered on and on, messing up what should have been a nice, peaceful ride with a great view. Oh, the cuffs hurt. Oh, my leg’s cramping; can you take off my shackles for a minute? Oh, did you hear about the beef between two people Wiley didn’t give two shits about?
After a couple minutes of listening to the man whining about things they all had to deal with, it made it a lot harder to deal with those things.
Wiley clenched his jaw, trying not to snap. He had a rough reputation on the inside, already—even though he’d only been at that prison a few weeks—but there was no sense starting beef with someone he’d be living with for the next twenty-five-to-life. Not over something so stupid, at least.
He stared out the window, instead, struggling to control the urge to throttle the guy with his chain. Not that he could have made it that far before a guard shot him or beat him down.
Outside, Wiley watched as a car passed on the right, a green Oldsmobile four-door…
Just like the one parked outside his prey’s house on the horrible night that had sent Wiley to prison, probably for the rest of his life. A flash image—his own hand, dripping red rain to the floor, gripping a hammer embedded in a man’s knee.
The passing car’s roaring engine became, for half a second, the scream of his second victim as he yanked the hammer free with a grin…
The transport van’s engine went abruptly silent, slowing.
Momentum sent Wiley smashing into the back of the next bench seat.
A guard up front yelled something, just as the van careened to the right, striking the green Oldsmobile broadside, sending it veering away and out of view.
The view in his window changed from the panoramic scrublands to open sky, making his stomach lurch, and it took him a moment to realize the prison transport van must have flipped.
In that moment, he saw that something was wrong with the sky. It wasn’t blue sky, anymore, but swirling lights of a green and yellow haze, far above.
The van kept flipping, sending it spinning in the air fast, end-over-end, and Wiley’s last conscious thought was to wonder why the northern lights were shining over Denver.
Pain. Wiley’s entire body hurt, but his left wrist was a spear of white-hot fire. He opened his eyes and blinked. Something was wrong—everything looked greenish-yellow.
He looked at the window opposite him. Its safety glass was gone, steel frame warped and twisted. Through it, he saw the sky hadn’t changed back. If anything, the effect was brighter than it had been.
As he sat watching the swirling, pulsing green and yellow sky, the light faded, faded… Only a few seconds later, he found himself looking at a properly blue sky once again. What the hell just happened? The eerie glow had vanished.
But not everything was normal. All he heard was silence, not eve
n road noise from other vehicles.
Or from the prisoners and guards. Someone should be yelling at him and the others to stay seated, or to get off the van. And surely someone got hurt enough in that crash to be shouting about it, or screaming…
Wiley counted to three, then hoisted himself up from the contorted position he’d ended up in between his bench seat and the one in front of him. The only sounds he heard were his own grunting from the pain, in his left wrist, especially, though he hurt all over.
It took some effort to get himself turned around and upright. But as his eyes crested the seats, he gasped and suddenly wished he hadn’t.
They were all dead. The prisoners and guards alike lay still, some with eyes still open.
He inched his way toward the van’s front, but it wasn’t necessary to touch any of the corpses as he passed to see they were gone. The worst one was the chatty guy, who’d been somehow decapitated; his head lay at the “bottom” of the van lying on its side, half in and half outside a glassless window frame.
The prisoner’s glassy eyes were still open, pointing right at Wiley, who shuddered at the thought that it could just as easily have been him lying there, headless.
Others were upside down, resting on their heads, necks broken. One had smashed the back of his skull open against the cage divider, leaving the driver’s compartment covered in blood and worse.
The guards were dead, too, though, and that meant that someone would be coming to check on them, and soon, when they missed a check-in or when they didn’t arrive as scheduled.
Wiley scrambled to grab what he could from the former guards, starting with the one who had been inside the “cage” in back with him and the other animals. That one had a key to unlock his chains. From the two up front, he took two 9mm pistols, and a sack lunch in a small black tactical backpack. The backpack also contained over one thousand dollars, along with a bank deposit slip with the word “rent” written in the Memo space.
He stuffed one gun in the backpack, the other in his waistband, and left the two shotguns as being too hard to conceal. The cash was easy to conceal, though. He also left the guards’ personal cell phones, as he had no useful numbers memorized, and the phones could be used to track him.
On his way out, he backtracked to open the glove box, where he found a box of 9mm ammunition. He stuffed that into his new backpack, too, and left.
Getting out of the van turned out to be a challenge. The windows on one side were blocked by the ground, and the others still had jagged little pieces of safety glass jutting from the rims. He didn’t relish cutting his hands up, or putting so much weight on his throbbing wrist, so he took a minute to figure out how to open the folding door. That done, he climbed over the dead guards, using the seats as leverage, and pulled himself up onto the side of the van. It still hurt his wrist, but a lot of his body weight was on his feet, that way, so it was bearable.
Outside, the Oldsmobile was totaled, and he saw no movement from the two people within. Scattered up and down the road as far as he could see, all the cars had stopped in both directions, even the heavier traffic that had been heading east.
Denver’s tallest buildings peeked over the terrain, to his west. In Denver lay his home turf, people he knew, help he could get—or take, if necessary.
Wiley ignored people shouting as they got out of their cars, across the cement berm dividing east and west traffic, and walked west, toward Denver, with the early-morning sun warming his back.
5
David skidded to a halt in the station parking lot. He and Orien stepped out of David’s old Bronco at the same time.
Orien went to get the prisoner in the back, whom they’d picked up for assault on their way into the station.
David had needed to pick up Orien when they both got the emergency, all-hands-on-deck phone call because his partner’s brand-new car wouldn’t start, after those weird lights in the sky, just like many of the newer cars stuck on the road or pushed off onto the shoulder, which they’d passed while coming into the station.
That turned out to be fortunate, because having Orien with him had kept the prisoner from getting too rowdy, once they had both stepped out of David’s SUV in full uniform at the scene of a collision, on the way in. The man had clubbed some guy with a tire iron after getting rear-ended, but the victim hadn’t looked too bad when the EMTs eventually took him away.
It had taken the ambulance an hour to get there, though, and it had been an ancient one at that—not all their gear worked when they did arrive.
David followed Orien, who used the cuffs on the prisoner’s wrists as leverage to goose-step him into the station.
As soon as David crossed the threshold, though, he paused. Orien did, too. The phones were ringing all through the station… That never happened. Something was wrong.
“Orien, shove our guest in a cell. I’ll handle the paperwork.”
“You got it.”
As Orien left, David found himself standing in the middle of a sea of chaos. Most of the computer monitors he could see had blank screens. The overhead LCDs, which usually showed prisoner names and statuses, flickered, black-screened.
He grabbed a passing beat cop. “Hey—”
“Sorry, Sarge. No time. The captain is going to brief us in ten minutes, though. With 9-1-1 down, it’s insanity around here.”
Before David could reply, the officer shrugged off his hand and bolted away toward the Evidence Room secure door. David watched as he pulled the security door open without so much as entering a code. It was unsecured…
Orien approached, crossing the chaos but oblivious to it, as he stared at his cell phone. “Hey, David, can I use your phone? I want to call my girlfriend, but mine died.”
“Sure.” But when David pulled out his phone, it, too, was dead. Strange—he’d put it on the charger when he went to bed, as he did every night. “Maybe not. Mine’s dead, too.”
A passing desk-jockey said, “They’re all down, Sarge. Mine, too. Stick around, though. Cap’s going to brief everyone.”
He already had been told that, but he said thanks, and then he and Orien both watched the glorified receptionist head to a desk and snatch up a phone. A real phone. David had almost forgotten those were there.
Orien broke the silence. “Did you notice that no one’s radios are going off?”
As soon as Orien said it, David figured out what hadn’t felt right. His partner was correct, and his sudden realization of the radio silence gave him a jolt that ran from his scalp down to his wrists, a tingle of shock.
Too much was going wrong this morning. The weird sky lights couldn’t be a coincidence. The jolt turned into a gnawing hole in the pit of his stomach as shock turned to fear. Yes, things were definitely not right.
When the captain ordered everyone to the briefing room over the PA system—the old one, not the NexTels, David noticed—he and Orien pushed their way toward the front of the line. He wanted to hear everything the man said in the briefing. He had the kind of hunch that he’d long ago learned to listen to, and it told him things were about to get really dire, really fast.
“Until further notice,” Captain Arnerich bellowed, getting everyone’s attention and killing every whispered conversation in the room, “no one leaves here. I’ve called in every officer, every reserve officer… Hell, I’ve tried to call in the ones who retired in the last few years. We couldn’t reach everyone, though. You may have noticed your cell phone died. Well, that’s every cell phone. The story gets worse from there.”
A rookie, younger even than Orien, raised his hand. David didn’t know the kid’s name, yet, but had seen him once or twice in passing, working the morning shift when he and Orien had to come off duty late, as they had for the past few days.
The captain snarled, “What is it, Reebok?”
David almost smiled, but didn’t have it in him. Must be a nickname.
The rookie squirmed under the captain’s glare. “Uh, Captain, do we know what’s going on, yet?
”
Someone in the room said, “That’s what we’re here to find out, newbie. Shut up and listen.”
The captain nodded to the room. “Thanks, Dan. The answer is, yes and no. We know the Northern Lights don’t come down this far, but they did this morning, and all hell broke loose after that. Cell phones—down. High-def broadcast TV—down. Lots of the newest cars from the last couple years just stopped working, as did some of our computers. Others glitched out, but started working again after a reboot—but no internet. Our fancy-ass satellite radio gear crapped out, too.”
“What about the old gear?” someone asked. “The tower’s still on the roof.”
“I put our IT guy onto that. He doesn’t have anything better to do at the moment, since we don’t carry a warehouse of spare computer parts and we can’t reach the company that used to service it. He’s not a pro with those radios, but he had some experience. Let’s hope it’s enough.”
“I think they went out of business a couple years ago, Cap.”
Arnerich let out a long breath. “Maybe so. But anything that connects via satellite is down. Even the squad cars’ GPS is down. Likewise, our connection to the internet, though it may still work elsewhere.”
Reebok started to raise his hand, lowered it, then asked, “Is all this because of the C-M-Es, sir?”
“Cee Em Ees?”
“Coronal Mass Ejections. I heard on some alternative news sources that we weren’t going to get hit with solar flares, but those ejections.”
“What’s the difference?”
Reebok shook his head and shrugged. “Those news people said it’s different. Flares are smaller, and mostly energy, no mass. Getting hit by a CME is like a ribbon of the sun itself reached out and smacked us, and it screws things up more. Like, they had one in the 1800s that fried most of our telegraph system.”
The door flew open, hitting an officer in the standing-room-only briefing room. The desk-jockey David had spoken to briefly when coming in, pushed his way inside. His eyes were wide, face pale.
Inception of Chaos: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Story Page 3
