by Tate, Harley
Keith exhaled and turned off the camera. Wherever she’s headed, I hope she lands everything she wants and more. With a heavy step, Keith headed toward the cafeteria and a much-needed afternoon jolt of caffeine. As he turned the corner, Crosby McNair’s greasy beard slammed straight into his chest.
“Hey, watch it.” Keith pushed the guy off, but Crosby didn’t even stop to apologize. He rushed past Keith, running in the same direction as Lainey: the boss’s office.
Crosby tore Trenton’s door open and it slammed against the wall, rattling the glass partitions down the entire length of the building. Keith froze. Two reporters in Trenton’s office? One was a freak occurrence, but two was unheard of. Something was definitely up. He turned back toward the studio setup and called out to the other cameraman on shift. “Hey, Mike, what the heck’s going on?”
“No idea.” Mike spooled a length of cable around his arm and shrugged. “Maybe there’s some hot news item and they both want the scoop.”
Keith dug his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through his contacts until he found a reporter at KTLA. He hit Call and brought the phone up to his ear.
A beeping sound made him wince before a robotic woman’s voice declared, “All circuits are busy. Please try your call again.”
What? That made no sense. He pulled up a web browser and tried to load Google news. Endless spinning. No content. He hopped off the network’s Wi-Fi and tried to connect over cellular. Still nothing.
Keith glanced up. Mike stared at his own phone, brows bunched up like a pair of angry caterpillars. “You able to get online?”
“Nope. Can’t make a call, either.”
“Same.” Keith tore a hand through his hair. Did Lainey and Crosby know something he didn’t? Had something big happened and now the whole city was in panic mode trying to call their friends and family and get online to read all about it? Every time an earthquake threatened Los Angeles calls failed and cellular networks clogged and slowed to a crawl. Was it an earthquake up north? Did San Francisco just slide into the ocean?
High heels clicked across the floor and Keith shot his head up in time to catch Lainey rushing past the studio. Keith took off after her, grabbing her by the arm as she reached the hall. He spun her around and pinned her with a stare. “What’s going on?”
Lainey backed up, heels bumping into the wall. “Leave me alone.” She pressed her lips together and swallowed so hard the muscles in her neck twitched.
Keith softened his grip and his tone. “Lainey, come on, you can tell me.”
Her eyes darted left and right. Her chest heaved with effort. At last, she looked him in the eye. “What’s the worst thing you can think of?”
“I don’t know, the cafe’s only serving decaf from now on?”
“I’m serious.”
Keith sobered. “War?”
Lainey didn’t even blink. “Worse.”
She motioned toward a darkened conference room a few doors down from the executive offices and Keith followed her inside. She eased the door closed and flipped on the light, but instead of talking, she just pressed her fingers to her lips and stood there, staring but not seeing.
Something had shaken her up, that was for sure. He tried to soft-pedal her into talking. “It’s okay, Lainey. Whatever’s going on, I can handle it.” He eased closer. “Just tell me.”
She nodded, blonde hair bobbing a second later than her head. Her words came out barely above a whisper. “There’s a massive electrical failure across the eastern half of the United States. Half of the country is in the dark.”
Keith swallowed. That’s why his phone wouldn’t call out and why the internet wouldn’t load. Cell companies relied on massive network hubs throughout the country to relay calls. Internet companies relied on cloud servers located in only a few major cities. They must be completely overloaded with people all trying to access the same sites and call their friends and family. Coverage would be intermittent and spotty at best.
He thought about the implications. A massive grid failure was unexpected, but it could have all sorts of benign explanations. An earthquake, a lightning storm, some other natural disaster. Depending on the damage, everything could be back online in a few hours. “Is that it?”
Lainey shook her head. “It’s not just the grid. Cars are stalled all over. They just stopped working in the middle of the road.”
Keith glanced at his watch and his mouth fell open. It was 5:17 p.m. EST. The height of rush hour on a Friday night. Max traffic. Max disruption. Millions of people from New York to Washington, DC to Atlanta stuck on highways and city streets miles from home. It would be chaos. It would be catastrophic.
Only one thing could cause a massive grid failure and cars to stall. “Was there an explosion?”
Lainey’s head bobbed up and down.
“Nuclear?”
“Maybe.”
“Fatalities?”
She shook her head and finally focused on his face. “It wasn’t on the ground. People have reported witnessing a bright flash in the sky right before the power failure.”
He pulled out a chair and fell into the seat. “A high-altitude nuclear missile.” Part of him didn’t believe it. Could something like this really happen? But another part knew the answer was a huge, blinking-neon yes. Keith glanced up at Lainey as she began to pace the length of the room. “Do you remember that special we ran last year on the National EMP Commission?”
She hesitated. “Was that one of Phil’s special reports?”
Keith nodded. “I was the main cameraman for the whole thing.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “The commission said the smallest electromagnetic pulse attack on the electric grid and the US would be starved of electricity, water, food, transportation, you name it.”
Her voice turned cold and empty. “For how long?”
“At least a year. And in the time it would take to get the grid back online, millions of people would die.” Keith flopped back against the seat. “Phil insisted they run this montage of images from the Great Depression in a black-and-white slideshow behind him as he talked. I had to zoom in on the faces of starving kids while he rattled off statistics.”
“He always goes for the sensational route.” Lainey tugged out a chair next to Keith and eased into it. “What else did the report cover?”
Keith thought back. “Apparently all the involved federal branches of government have been passing the buck for years, claiming some other department is responsible to shore up the country’s infrastructure.”
“So no one’s done it?”
“Afraid not.”
Lainey shivered.
“Did it mention anything about who could be responsible?”
“Basically everyone who hates us can access the technology. Russia, China, North Korea, even relatively small terrorist cells.”
She paled and gripped the armrests. “Do you think we’re at war?”
Keith reached for her hand. “I sure as hell hope not.”
Chapter Four
LAINEY
KSBF Studios
Los Angeles, California
Friday, 2:37 p.m. PST
Lainey stared at Keith, a war of emotions threatening to break her facade. Reporters kept it together and neutrally disseminated the news. They didn’t turn into blubbering messes plagued with indecision. But this wasn’t a routine piece about a traffic stop gone bad or corruption in the mayor’s office. Thanks to Midge, Lainey possessed information about a possible nuclear attack.
Was the grid failure on the East Coast from a bomb? Was the attack already in motion? She cursed herself for not asking more questions when she had her sister on the phone. Now she was the only one in the office with information on a potential larger attack, and she didn’t know what to do with it. Should she tell Keith? Would he even believe her or just blow her off like everyone else?
She pulled away from him and pressed her fingers to her temples. Until she knew more, she couldn’t drag him int
o this mess. When she left him, she lost the right to ask for his help.
“What did Trenton say?”
The question jolted her back to the present. “All hands on deck to cover the outage.”
“So aren’t you going to?”
“What if there’s more to it? What if this isn’t all that’s about to happen?”
“Do you know something?”
Lainey swallowed. “I’m not sure. It’s just a hunch, mostly.”
Keith smiled in encouragement. “Sounds like you’re being the reporter you’ve always wanted to be. Your instincts are spot on, Lainey. If you have a hunch and you think there’s more to the story, you should follow it.”
She snorted. “I’m not some Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. I’ve sat at a desk for months.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.” Keith leaned forward, his brown eyes earnest and sincere. “You have a degree in journalism. You know what you’re doing.”
She wished that were enough. “I haven’t broken a story since the police corruption piece ages ago.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t.”
“Trenton practically laughed me out of his office.” Lainey clenched her hands. “I need some sort of proof.”
“Then start looking.”
More than anything, she wished she weren’t alone. Part of her longed to spill everything she knew to Keith and beg for his help, but she couldn’t. Not yet. How many times did she stand him up for a date because the boss asked her to work late? How many times did she push off marriage and a family because the next promotion was just around the corner?
It wasn’t fair to drag him back into the pursuit of the very job that tore them apart. If it all turned out to be a wild goose chase and she’d brought him into it, she would never forgive herself. She swallowed down her regret and fear and managed to smile. “Are you sticking around?”
Keith glanced at his watch. “For now. At some point I’ve got to get home, but if I know John, he’ll ask me to stay. Mike’s already worked a double.”
Relief flooded through Lainey, but she kept it off her face. “I’m going to see what I can find out from my desk. Maybe we could regroup later?”
He nodded as he stood up. “Whatever you find, I want to know. Good or bad.”
Lainey watched him walk away. With broad shoulders and a thick build from lugging camera equipment all over Los Angeles, he didn’t blend into the landscape, and his personality didn’t, either. Keith said what he meant and meant what he said, a rare find in southern California. His honesty was one of the main attributes that drew her to him in the first place. She valued his opinion, no matter what. It was both why she wanted to tell him and why she couldn’t until she knew more.
As he disappeared down the hall, Lainey sucked in a breath. Midge wanted her to leave town and hide out, but the drive to uncover the truth and put it out there overrode her survival instincts. If the power outage was the first wave in some bigger plot to destroy the United States, Lainey refused to run. She would dig up the facts and broadcast them to anyone and everyone. The American people deserved to know.
Lainey stood up and squared her shoulders. I can do this. I can find someone who knows something. She strode out of the conference room, past the studio space, and straight to her cubicle in the newsroom. As she plunked into the rolling chair, a voice carried over the fabric partition.
“—telling you there has to be someone on the ground with a viable connection… No! Audio won’t cut it. I need video and I need it yesterday. Everyone on the West Coast is freaking out. Half the calls won’t go through, people can barely get online. There’s going to be riots out here soon if we can’t give the masses something!”
The exasperated voice belonged to Will Anton, a beat reporter who broke a story last month on health care fraud. He’d started around the same time as Lainey and he’d been a steady contributor to the station’s web news ever since. It probably helped that with his soda-bottle glasses and his barely five-foot-three height he didn’t even try to get in front of the camera.
“I know it’s chaos out there, but help me out! We’re getting crushed by the national networks. Give me something!” A thud shook Lainey’s desk and her cup full of supplies tipped over. As pens and pencils rolled across the desk, Will let out a string of curses. “What part of ‘we need a story now,’ don’t these imbeciles understand?”
“Maybe they’re a little busy dealing with the mass panic and hysteria.” Lainey gathered up her collection of writing instruments as Will’s head appeared above the divider.
“That guy owes me. I soft-balled him a scoop on his governor’s slush fund and use of the state police for everything from picking up his dry cleaning to babysitting his cocker spaniel.”
“This is a little bigger than a spoiled dog, don’t you think?”
Will folded his arms over the top of the cubicle and leaned against the partition. “Exactly my point. Have you seen the coverage coming out of CNN and MSNBC? They’ve got bodies on the ground in Atlanta and New York broadcasting from dark subway stations and jammed highways.”
“How is that possible? I thought the entire East Coast grid was down?”
“It is, but cell phones are still working. They’ve got reporters recording video on their phones and then uploading via satellite to their sister networks outside the collapse.”
Lainey scrunched up her face. “How long can that possibly keep working?” She thought about cell phone batteries and the tenuous nature of satellite connections. Would a high-altitude bomb throw satellites off kilter? She wished she knew more about the scientific details.
Will huffed out another curse. “It doesn’t matter if it only lasts another five minutes or five years. If we don’t get on screen and give people something, we’ll be last in the ratings and this station will go belly-up before our next paychecks.”
Lainey wanted to tell him a whole heck of a lot more might happen before then, but she knew Will would ask her for the proof, and right now she didn’t have it. As Will eased back down to his own desk, Lainey pulled out her phone and called her sister. The call wouldn’t connect.
She tried her mother. Straight to voicemail. She dropped her voice so Will couldn’t hear. “Hey Mom, it’s Lainey. I don’t know if you’ve talked to Midge or if you’re still in the city, but if you are, stay safe. I’m working the story and as soon as I find out more, I’ll let you know.”
With the near-frantic way Midge insisted Lainey leave Los Angeles, she must have been even more determined when she called their mother. Lainey hoped her mother took Midge’s advice and was far away from the confusion and traffic jams blanketing Chicago. She couldn’t imagine what that must look like. Several million cars all stalled out on the highways and surface streets. The train dark and silent underground or up on the tracks. Millions of commuters trapped in the city, miles and miles from their families and homes.
Her mother lived right in the middle of it all in a high-rise with twenty-four-hour security and an underground parking deck. All Lainey could do was hope she made it out and that she was safe somewhere. It’s all she could hope for Midge, too. Her sister wouldn’t have done something rash, would she?
Lainey pulled up Rick’s number and tapped it. A single ring before, “We’re sorry, this phone number is no longer in service.” Impossible. Lainey tried again. Same result. The hairs on her arms lifted as goosebumps raced across her flesh. Rick would never disconnect his phone without letting her know. Not unless something terrible happened.
She swallowed hard and turned on her computer. The old machine whizzed and groaned and finally started up after a painful few minutes. If only I’d brought my laptop. But Lainey hadn’t been thinking straight when she’d rushed out the door.
At last, the computer finished booting up and Lainey opened a web browser. It took forever to find a news site that would load. The first five she tried crashed over and over or came up with error messages and high traffic not
ices.
As the front page for an Orlando affiliate filled the screen, Lainey pulled back in shock. Wreckage from a huge airliner littered a grassy front yard, the remains of a house still burning behind it. What on earth? Lainey scrolled. According to the news reports, as soon as the power grid collapsed, planes began to fall from the sky. Some emergency-landed, others crashed.
Eyewitness reports outside Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport confirmed multiple downed planes, some nothing more than charred bits and pieces. Lainey exhaled to slow her rapid-fire heart and clicked on a waiting video. An Orlando-based reporter stood outside the chain-link fence surrounding an airplane landing strip, mic held up to a man’s face.
“I’m here with David Donahue, one of the air traffic controllers here at Orlando International Airport. Tell me what you’ve seen.”
“It’s horrible, Leslie. Planes are falling out of the sky all over the East Coast. Whatever happened to the power grid, it fried the electronics on planes in the air, too.”
“Without electronics, are modern planes still operational?”
“It depends on the capability of the pilot and the extent of the damage.”
Lainey stopped the video. It was worse than she feared. A million times worse. She couldn’t leave the studio until she found out if this was the end or only the beginning.
Chapter Five
KEITH
KSBF Studios
Los Angeles, California
Friday, 5:03 p.m. PST
“Welcome to the KSBF five o’clock news. This is Philip Teachum, along with Marjorie Lee, reporting.”
Keith panned the camera and zoomed in on Marjorie’s face. From his viewpoint, he could see the papers fluttering in her lap, but above the desk, she maintained her anchorwoman veneer.
