by Anna Dove
What a heavy responsibility it is, to have secrets. The whispers of tragedies to come, bottled up like fermenting vinegar. The conversations from the previous night echoed in her head, like horror movie scenes that one tries to forget. All of these people, wandering about with their strollers and grocery bags, racing to make their next meeting, trying to decide whether to order whole or skim milk in the latte, paying the gas bill and picking up the dry cleaning. All of these people, rushing about in sweet oblivion to the fact that somewhere in the country, a nuclear bomb would wipe out hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions... Her gaze fell unwittingly to her watch.
12:17 pm.
+
Haley could not finish her second cup of coffee, but she kept it in her hands to keep them steady and occupied, lest they tremble. On the other side of her desk sat the communications assistant, a skinny girl with sleek black hair pulled into an unforgiving knot at the nape of her neck. The assistant’s face was long and thin, with protruding cheekbones and deep set brown eyes. She wore a black dress and black heels and was overall quite strict in appearance.
“Haley?” she said in a thin voice that perfectly matched her exterior.
“Yes,” started Haley. “Sorry. Go ahead.” The assistant had been speaking for a while and a few minutes into the speech, Haley’s mind had wandered. New York. She knew people in New York, friends of friends. One lived in Brooklyn and had a puppy and worked at a local brewery. Another lived in Soho and worked in the financial district. Real estate, she remembered. If it hit New York today, they would be incinerated.
“I’m sorry,” she suddenly broke out, interrupting the communications assistant, who stopped mid-sentence and stared again, irritated. “I have to deal with something urgent. Please come back tomorrow and we will sort out the messaging on these subjects.”
“Okay,” retorted the other, and standing up, grabbed the folders and papers she had brought, and left the room in a huff audibly muttering under her breath about raises and not having to put up with incompetent people.
+
Elizabeth met Carlos just outside of the Eisenhower building. As she approached, he sensed immediately that something was very wrong.
“Are you alright?” he asked, facing her. His expression was anxious; he had never before seen her so pale or with such dark circles under her eyes.
“No,” she said haggardly, and her gaze searchingly met his.
He offered his arm, and she moved toward him, when suddenly behind her there sounded a terrible crashing noise. She whirled around, to see a Prius wrapped around a metal lamp post. She gasped, but as she did there was another crashing sound, and to her right a car rear ended another. There was a scream, and another. All at once, the majority of all the vehicles on the road seemed to lose control, swerving into each other and into sidewalks and storefronts. Their electric engines and systems seemed to be malfunctioning simultaneously. Metal scraped on metal, human cries echoed, and the smell of burnt rubber emanated almost instantly.
Dumbfounded, Elizabeth could not move, as her eyes took in the horrors before her. A man rolled out of the passenger seat from a crushed car fifteen feet away, clutching his leg, from which the bone protruded. His mouth gaped in a silent scream.
She felt her arm pulled; Carlos grabbed her chin and pushed it toward the sky. His finger pointed toward some clouds, and she followed its direction as if in a daze.
There, free falling from the sky not very far away, was a passenger plane. It spiraled toward the earth unwaveringly, until it disappeared from sight behind the buildings. A moment, then a great horrible pillar of smoke hurled in a cylinder upwards.
After a brief moment of frozen bewilderment, pedestrians began to run. Dodging around trash cans and benches they leaped, fleeing broken glass and smoking metal. Some of the women took off their heels and abandoned them, shoes flung into the dirt. Unearthly screeches came from those unfortunates trapped inside crushed cars. A woman rushed towards them, her eyes wide open but fixated on nothing. She stopped as she almost collided with them, and then opening her mouth, she shut it again and lept past them.
“Run,” hissed Carlos frantically, and grabbing her hand tightly, he pulled her from her dazed reverie, and into the smoke and the twisted metal of the nightmarish street.
+
Haley sat alone in her office. She tried to breathe evenly and slowly to calm her body. Her hands rested on the oak desk; they trembled and left sweaty marks on the wood.
She remembered Alan Turing after he had broken the Nazi code with his Enigma machine. She remembered that the British had to stand by and watch as their ships were obliterated, as their men were blown to pieces, because holding ones’ cards close to ones’ chest is the only way to win. If the British had prevented every Nazi attack and so shown the Germans that the Nazi code was being intercepted every day, the Germans would have invented a new code. And so the British watched as their fathers, brothers and sons were killed, so that the continent might be saved. Life, sometimes, is a game of chess, but the kings and queens, the bishops, rooks, knights, and pawns are not wooden and stone, but flesh and blood.
Her telephone rang, and the light blinked on line one. It was the Senator.
“Haley--can you go over to Lee’s office in Dirksen? I’ve scheduled a meeting with him and you and I. We need to ask him about the members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. And Haley--I’m asking you because it just needs to be the three of us.” His voice was tense.
“Yes, I’ll go now,” she responded, and hung up.
In between the Russell and Dirksen Senate office buildings, there are tunnels that create an easy and safe access line for members of congress and their staffers. The tunnels are white-walled and well lit.
Haley descended on the elevator, by herself. It pinged cheerfully as she reached the tunnel floor, and the shining reflective doors opened for her to exit. The overhead lights above her shone glaringly as she walked, her heart racing, down the tunnel toward Dirksen. She was the only pedestrian; the tunnel was empty.
And then, with no noise or other indication, every light went out, and the subterranean tunnel was plunged into a darkness deeper than the blackest midnight.
Haley stopped, her senses suddenly acute. She could hear no movement. Slowly she took one step, and then another, to her right, hand outstretched. In a few paces her fingertips met the cool wall. She flattened her body to it immediately, and crouched down.
No sounds met her ears, only deafening silence. When one listens too hard to quietness, it begins to buzz, and tingle in one’s ears. Haley waited, her eyes wide open but seeing nothing, her ears straining for anything. She began to notice her own breathing, and the heartbeat pounding in her chest.
It crossed her mind that this could somehow be part of the attack. She should not be in such a weak position. If anyone shone a light, she would be visible. Inching forward, she began to slide along the length of the wall, stopping every few seconds to listen.
After what seemed like an eternity, her fingers met an adjoining wall. Here were elevator doors--useless, of course. She continued to her left until she found the crack of another door. Here was the staircase to Dirksen. Sliding her hand up, she found the door handle, and twisted. The electrical lock accessible by badge was no more; the door swung open easily.
Finding the wall to her right, she stepped carefully up the frozen escalator, her left hand in front. Here was another door.
Haley cautiously cracked open the door, which was unlocked, and a ray of dim light pierced into the stairwell. She peered out into the hall. Sunlight fell onto its marble floor from the open doors of offices, with windows that allowed for natural light to enter. But, from what she could see, all electrical lighting was out; there were no hall overheads, no office lamps.
A staffer scuttled by, running as fast as his short fat legs could carry him. Haley watched him disappear around the corner of the next hall. Then, she heard someone crying hysterically
.
It seemed to be coming from another hall over. Haley opened the door and slipped into the hallway. There was an office to her left--Senator Marco Rubio’s, she had been there many times--and she stepped into it quietly, looking around at its empty desks and empty adjoining offices where her colleagues usually sat. Great burgundy curtains hung from the ceiling over the window facing the street on the far side of the room. Haley made her way around the abandoned desks toward it. Papers were strewn on the floor by the window as if they had been dropped.
She peered out the window, and her body froze still as a statue; her hands rose to cover her mouth as it opened agape.
+
Carlos pulled Elizabeth past an ugly wreck, and she lowered her head, lifting the neck of her shirt to cover her mouth and nose from the smell of burning rubber. She wished she could cover her ears to drown out the screams and shrieks, but they echoed, only accumulating as the two ran down toward the monuments. The entire road was littered with wrecks, and as Elizabeth looked to her left and right, it appeared that the chaos did not stop there. Another plane, this one over Virginia near DCA, was hurtling to the ground; this time one of its wings ripped off in the pressure and fell side by side as far as the eye could see. Elizabeth’s throat was dry, and her ears rang, but a certain focus had set in, an animalistic self-preservation that heightened her senses. She clutched Carlos’ hand as he moved forward quickly.
They passed people lying on the ground, unconscious, wounded, bleeding, sometimes eerily still. All of the airbags had been activated in the cars and through the wreckage one could see the empty white balloons lying limp. Some people were uninjured, and stood in shock and horror; others fainted and fell, others ran in all directions. One man tore off his suit jacket and left it behind, running only in his slacks and undershirt.
The Washington Monument stood in front of them, a quarter of a mile away. There was a distant crowd of people huddled around it, sitting and watching helplessly, unsure of what else to do. Elizabeth suddenly tugged on Carlos’ hand. He stopped and spun to face her, and then he pulled her to the edge of the sidewalk as far as possible from the road.
“We need to go to my home,” she said urgently. “Away from this. Before dark.” He paused for a moment, and then nodded.
Elizabeth glanced around again, and something else seemed off, beyond the chaos of the streets. She raised her eyes above the wreckage, and the people, and the pavement, and scanned the storefronts and building windows.
“Carlos,” she said suddenly, “there are no lights on.”
Carlos looked up. The windows, the storefronts, the lamp posts, the electric advertisements--they were all without any hint of electric power.
A sickness hit the pit of Elizabeth’s stomach, and she felt as if she had been punched. The realization struck her; she knew what had happened.
“It never was New York,” she whispered, her eyes staring at the smoke wafting from a red corvette in front of her, whose driver slumped unconscious over the wheel.
“What?” retorted Carlos quickly.
“I know what’s happened,” she said. “We need to go. Now. It will only get worse, and every minute we stand here, we risk our lives exponentially.”
+
Haley took off her short heels, so that her bare feet sank into the carpet in the empty office. She placed them on the floor amidst the dropped papers and stepped to the doorway of the office. She would not have time to go to the Senator’s office.
No one was in sight; they must have generally evacuated before she came out of the tunnel. Tensing her muscles, she jumped into a sprint.
Down the hall she flew, toward the door. The marble was cold on her feet, and there was an eerie stillness in the air. Usually the halls were bustling with suited staff, eager interns, powerful Senators. Not a soul breathed in the wide space; no secretaries on telephones, no reporters, no one. The American flags by each congressional office fluttered as she ran past and then hung still.
Down the hall, to the left, down a stair. Another left, a right, and there was the exit. The security system lay inactive. She ducked under the detecting arch and pushed through the brass doors into the sunlight.
A man, running, almost collided with her, but she stepped back just in time as he barreled by. The car wrecks and screaming had worsened since she looked from the window. Haley choked back nausea as she saw a woman too pale to be alive, pressed between an airbag and the seat. She averted her eyes and avoided looking inside any more cars.
No one was speaking; those who were injured were moaning and trying to move away from the wreckage. Those uninjured ran. No one had yet entered into aggressiveness; self-preservation was the only motivator at the moment.
Haley saw a bike share rack and ran to it. The electrical screen indicators were off. She pulled at the handles of a bike, and it slid out easily, uninhibited by its electrical lock.
Home. She had to go home.
Jumping onto the seat, she set off pedaling southeast along the mall. No cell phones were working; people were desperately trying to dial family or friends with no luck. Then, Haley slid to a halt as her eye caught something truly horrible.
A plane was falling from high in the sky. She watched in horror as it neared the earth and fell out of view behind buildings. There was a slight booming noise like far away thunder, and a column of smoke rose up. Haley looked around.
A rush of fear enveloped her, because she saw that others had begun to notice the planes as well, and that a rising hysteria was coming. Putting her foot to the pedal, she pushed off fiercely and sped in the direction of Memorial Bridge to Arlington.
In forty-five minutes, she had reached the apartment, cutting through wooded paths and back roads as often as possible. She avoided all wreckage and pedestrians, and kept an eye on the sky, although she knew that all the planes were down by now. Most pedestrians hurried by as she did, though, eager to keep to themselves. By the time she reached the apartment, she was drenched in sweat, from adrenaline, fear, exercise, and heat.
She pulled the key from her pocket and unlocked her door, calling out quietly,
“Elizabeth?”
No response. She shut the door behind her and locked both the deadbolt and the handle. Quickly she made a sweep of the house but found no one there. Retreating into her room, she reached under her bed and withdrew her handgun and box of ammunition. For the next few minutes, she loaded the gun carefully, pushing the metal cartridges into the magazine with her thumb, and dumped the rest of the ammunition into a small pouch purse with drawstring straps.
+
The blue line metro car was filled with midday passengers as it wound from Foggy Bottom towards Franconia Springfield. The passengers inside sat quietly, eyes on their cell phones or their books, earbuds drowning out the noise of the metro. Their music, individual and yet universal, filled the train, each person lost in their own tune.
Feet shifted, eyes glanced absently, a sigh here, a breath there. The train rolled on smoothly underground, just one car amongst the hundreds that filled the subterranean spider web of the metro system.
Then, there was darkness, and the train slowed, as the music stopped.
+
Inside the apartment silence reigned, but outside the birds continued to chirp, and Haley could hear them through the window. The shadows grew longer, and she waited anxiously. The natural light spilling through the window began to fade, and Haley got up and lit a candle, pulling the shades tightly shut. Softly the yellow candlelight lit the room, casting dancing shadows around the bookshelf and the couches and the kitchen sink.
A furtive knock. Haley jumped and went to the peephole, peering through. It was Elizabeth--and someone else--Carlos. She unlocked the door.
Elizabeth stepped inside, Carlos behind her, and wordlessly embraced Haley. It was the kind of affection displayed when the human body is warped with anxiety and simply needs another person’s warmth for comfort. Carlos locked the door in both places, and when h
e turned back, the three sat down on the floor. The candlelight lit their faces, and shadows fell behind them.
“EMP,” whispered Elizabeth, and Haley nodded.
“What are you talking about?” responded Carlos.
“It’s an electromagnetic pulse attack,” said Elizabeth. “A nuclear explosion that occurred in the atmosphere.”
“Wipes out the power grid,” added Haley quietly. “With that, comes infrastructure, roads, food services, water purification, security…” her voice trailed off.
“There will be chaos tonight,” said Carlos. “Once people figure out that the food supply is limited, they will become animals.”
“Yes,” murmured Elizabeth solemnly.
The three sat in silence for a moment.
“How long does this last, and how far do you think it extends geographically?” asked Carlos.
Elizabeth shifted. “I have read a few reports on these for a project. It’s never certain. It depends on the altitude and location of the explosion and if there were many explosions or just one. As for timeline, well, at shortest months and at longest years.”