by Anna Dove
“How the hell did you let this happen?” he shouted abruptly, standing and gesturing at Simons, Clark and Limon. Hostility percolated in the air. “You failed to do your job. How the hell did you let this happen?”
Clark rose to his feet and Limon pulled him back down. Clark was a short, squat man with bulging eyes and Limon was an older woman with leathery skin and sleek gray hair. She placed a restraining hand on Clark’s shoulder as the man sat fuming at the accusation.
“Sir, I assure you it was not of our doing or of our failing.”
Mary Jo Anderson had turned from the wall, her tears drying in her surprise at the argumentative turn of events.
“Then explain to me,” seethed Tarnes, spittle flying as he spoke, “What happened? How did the most elaborate and exhaustive attack on the United States occur without you catching an iota of an inkling that it would?”
Clark rose to his feet again and this time Limon could not hold him back. Clark sprang at Tarnes, but before he could reach his target, a massive hand grabbed him by the collar and flung him back onto his seat, where he stared upward in shock. Braddock towered between the two, and Tarnes thought it wise to sit.
Braddock turned around the room, keeping eye contact. He had bright blue eyes that blazed daringly at the company.
“There will be no accusations,” he said calmly, but the tone struck a chill into the hearts of all. “I refuse to let you all take out your fear, anger, and bewilderment on each other. No one in this room was responsible for anything. Get that into your heads. There will be no accusations. Each and every one of you is here because the President trusts you and needs you. You would be fools to forget that. Now shut the hell up.”
Tarnes squirmed but he wisely held his tongue as the general spoke. Mary Jo Anderson also slipped intimidated to her seat, as Braddock glanced her way
The train sped on along the dark tunnel, closer and closer to Chimaugua.
+
The Capitol building is quite impressive, stretching out wide with its Greco-Roman architecture. It lends a certain prestige to those who serve within it; they seem to be elevated to a demigodic level. Their brains are the powerhouses of our laws. They drive society forward (or backward, if you are a skeptical reader) in a fiery fight, pushing and pulling left and right like an eternal game of Tug of War. They negotiate, they postulate, they accuse, they wax eloquent, they fail, they succeed, they lose, they win. Each member possesses a certain quality, a certain charm, a certain belief, that endears them to their constituents and allows them to sit in the opulence of the heart of Washington. When we see them on the street, we want their picture, their autograph, their remarks, we want a piece of the life that they have. We see them on the television larger than life, the cameras catching their every reaction. And to be sure, save for a very few noble souls, humility is not the most prominent of traits among the members.
But when your life is torn out from under you, when you do not know if your precious children are dead, when you cannot be assured that your wife or husband is still breathing, when every shred of safety and functionality has been unceremoniously ripped like a brutal scalping from the nation that you have decided to lead, when you are forced into underground tunnels and trains that cannot reach the light of day, and then plummeted nine hundred feet down toward the molten core of the earth, you become someone quite different. The most raw instincts and emotions begin to surface, especially tendencies towards self-preservation.
For twenty-four hours after the attack, a continuous stream of people flowed into Chimaugua Bunker; Members of Congress, police, military officials, the one Supreme Court justice who could be found, and cabinet members found themselves in the grim steel corridors, being directed by guards to their quarters and to the conference rooms.
The First Lady Adela Gilman sat on her bunk. She had been directed to a dormitory room with eight sets of trim steel bunk beds. One pillow, one blanket. She regarded the bed with disdain, and then changed into the clothing that they provided to everyone. Upon entry each person had been given a tan aviator-style jumpsuit that zipped from the belly button to the neck and carried a loose elasticity at the presumed waistline. Adela pondered glumly on the similarity of her situation to that of an inmate. She had not anticipated Chimaugua Bunker being so distasteful.
The door opened and another woman entered, a short round brunette with red lips and pale face.
“Oh--I’m sorry,” she began, but Adela waved her hand, defaulting to the charm that had helped her husband win his presidency.
“Nonsense, now is no time for apologies. What’s your name?”
“Congresswoman Anna Martin, from District 1 in Pennsylvania.” Anna stepped forward and shook Adela’s outstretched hand, and then covered it with her other hand and burst into tears.
“I just can’t take it,” Anna wept. “I can’t take it. My husband is up there. I have a three year old son. He just turned three last week. We had a party with balloons and trucks. He loves trucks. I just can’t take it. I need to be with him.” She released Adela’s hand and wrapped her arms around Adela’s slim frame.
Adela stroked the woman’s hair soothingly.
“There there,” she said as Anna’s round frame shook from head to toe in misery. “The worst is now; we will figure it all out. I’m sure that they will be alright. Let us hope and pray, yes? And let us work toward justice, toward making sure that whoever did this receives his due penalty.”
The door opened, and Reed appeared. Adela saw him, and dropped her arms.
“Will you give us a moment, Anna?” she asked the crying woman, who started when she saw the chief of staff.
“Why--yes, of course,” stammered Anna, and wiping her eyes, stepped from the room. Reed nodded to her as she exited.
He stepped into the room, closing the door quietly, and approached Adela quickly. He took her hands in his, and then dropping them, wrapped his arms around her.
“My beautiful sweetheart,” he said, in a low tone into her ear.
“Hello,” she responded, and pulling back so that her face was close to his, kissed him.
“You are alright?”
“Quite.”
“Mentally?”
“Yes.”
“Physically?”
“Yes.”
“Emotions?”
“In tact.”
“It is done,” he said wonderingly, excitedly, still speaking very softly. “They were all perfectly complicit. I am glad that we have so many people that we can rely on. Very well executed.”
“Very well executed,” she repeated. “Are you alright?”
“Yes, in every way. I am ready. I am ready to see to the next step.”
“Is the Vice President alive?”
“No,” said Reed. “He was easy to dispense with. He was dead before they even got to him. One less hurdle to overcome.”
Adela smirked, her beautiful lips curling cruelly.
“I never liked him,” she said. “Even when he was just a friend of my husband’s.”
“No one knows that he’s dead yet--don’t say anything.”
“I will be as silent as his grave.”
Reed smiled at her, his face close to hers.
“Do you remember when we first met?” she said suddenly.
“Of course. At that party, when your husband was fundraising for running for governor.”
“I fell in love with you from the minute I realized you were so much like me.”
“What, you mean perfect?”
She smiled.
“No. I mean what you wanted. You looked at something, you wanted it, you took it. You did not waste time, or spare feelings. That night when you convinced my husband to make you his Chief of Staff, that’s when I knew I loved you.”
“I’ll never give up on something that I want,” he said. “I wanted Chief of Staff. I wanted you. Look at me now.”
“Yes...look at you now.”
Reed kissed her and then pulled awa
y.
“I have to go,” he said. “The closer I stay to your husband, the more influence I have on these next steps.”
“Godspeed,” said Adela, raising her hand as Reed went from the room.
+
James Landon sat in the aviator-style attire provided, with his hands clasped in front of him, intently staring at a black speck on the steel wall in front of him. His mind raced. This was it, then. Not a nuclear strike. No, that was far too paltry and kind; rather, a devastation unimaginable, a desolation of America. His knuckles went white as his grip tightened.
The door to his dormitory room opened and the Senator entered.
“Landon, I’m glad to see you here.”
The Senator approached, and began to change into his own attire.
“Joe, is he here?”
“Who?”
“Reed,” said Landon.
“Of course the Chief of Staff is here. Why wouldn’t he be here?”
The Senator looked very intently at Landon as he spoke this sentence.
“No--I was only wondering,” fumbled Landon, understanding that the Senator did not think it was wise to speak out loud on the matter.
The Senator, having donned the new garb, sat down beside Landon.
“We have work to do,” he said quietly.
11. The Achilles’ Heel
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
---Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1838
For a moment, our lens falls away from the room in Arlington and moves upwards and outwards. We see the cities of Arlington, Alexandria, and Washington from above, jammed with cars and with little running pedestrians who from our aerial perspective are no bigger than ants on an anthill. There are fires, there is smoke; crashed planes and cars ignite, and you can see the explosions. A smog begins to set in; it rests heavy in the air from all the smoke, and mixes with the still bright afternoon sunlight in a strange orange color. If we could smell it, smell the odor of terror, we would smell burning rubber, burning gas, burning cloth. If we could hear, we would hear screams from the pits of stomachs, cries from the old and the young, and then after a while we would also notice the particular silence in between the screams and the cries, the sort of silence that is desperate, that keeps the inhale inside its lungs because it does not know if it will draw another breath again. This is the silence of the family now waiting in their living room, locked inside for dear life with their arms around each other, lost as to what to do. It is the silence of the man running without his suit jacket, blind to all other pedestrians.
Our lens climbs higher into the atmosphere, and we see that beyond Washington, in every direction, more cities are smoking. The smoke thins as we look over agricultural districts, over rivers and farms and woodland, but over every city there hangs a cloud of smoke and over every town the smog wisps thinly into the air. How far does this stretch? We must ascend further.
Virginia, in smoke. Maryland, in smoke. Higher, we see the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware. Smoke. Now we can distinguish the curve of the earth; we see farther out west--Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. Now we are to Kansas, we can see Alabama, Texas, and now even further. As our lens reaches far into the upper atmosphere, we can see California, stretching long, and a great heavy smog covers Los Angeles and San Diego.
Could it be? Could the entire United States of America have fallen victim to attack? Could the great forerunner of democracy, the country on whom no one dared launch an attack since the turn of the century, could it be going up in smoke? We are skeptical; our lens must be flawed. We rub it with a cloth, and peer back again. The smog remains.
Now we begin to ruminate on the cost of this attack. Whatever sick brilliance has executed this attack has truly outdone himself. He has wandered the streets, observing the American people. A people entirely dependent on technology. He sees people of all ages out and about with each other, talking to each other but their eyes glued to their mobile phones, distracted from reality. He sees the automobiles running on electricity. He sees the mothers with their babies on the hip, the former jabbering away with her cell phone pressed against her ear, far too loudly for her neighbor’s convenience, while she tries to pick out which brand of waffles she wants to buy. He sees a man transfer money from his savings account to his checking account online, without stepping foot in a physical bank. He sees a young couple using google maps to navigate through Manhattan and becoming entirely lost when their signal fades. He sees ibuprofen bottles stocked by the billions on grocery store shelves. He sees that pain is something Americans do not tolerate very well. He sees opioid overdoses, he sees empty alcohol bottles by the millions. He sees that in the kitchen, there is a little electronic device that controls the lighting, the temperature, the oven, the microwave. He sees the political schisms in ideology, the lack of a national identity. He sees racial divide. He sees ignorance, he sees anger. He sees laziness, he sees workaholics. He sees a nation simultaneously addicted somehow to both ease and money. He thinks, is this the same country of brave souls that fled from political, religious, and economic persecution to establish their own civil liberties and rights?
He continues to observe.
He sees an American narcissism, a fascination with self, in social media. He sees imperfect people attempting to portray themselves online as perfect. He sees that social media has crept into the psychological makeup of all ages, genders, and races across the country. They have lost touch with reality, with why clouds form, with why plants grow, with civics, with history, with their own families, with community, with spirituality, as they creep more and more into an isolated state. They search to fill their natural need for love on the social media platforms, drawing their affirmation from false sources, and then wonder why they do not feel happy. Look at all the likes. Look at all the followers. Look how beautiful I am. Look how perfect my life is. I really do have it all together. Love me.
A withdrawal from technology leaves our minds in a restless state, tossing and turning with loneliness and disconnection. Lying with our heads on the pillow, wide awake and staring at the ceiling, we realize that perhaps our loneliness has been assuaged by the benevolent glow of the electronic pocket companion. Perhaps we have, in the crusade to fill our souls, turned to something quite dead while ignoring the living.
Our pocket companions feel very alive. After all, like small children, they speak when spoken to. Like rational beings they follow patterns. Like brilliant scientists they instantaneously perform calculation, like a videographer they record at any moment, like the postman they send our messages. Like any person consuming a beverage, they recharge from a power source. They make noise; they respond to our touch; they seem, quite honestly, quasi human.
And, in an even more fortunate turn, they do not have emotion. While they perform many tasks that humans can do, they are not encumbered with the inconvenience of feeling anything. They will not cry if dropped and cracked; they will not voice an objection to any command. They are silent until you need them. They are compliant, obedient, subservient, non-confrontational. With our pocket companions we avoid all the horrible messiness of real human relationships —the arguments, the competition, the disagreements, the awkward moments, the uncomfortable encounters that are inevitable when a human relationship deepens. What is best of all is that we no longer need to worry, if we focus on our pocket companions, about developing our capacities for love—laboring in sacrifice for others’ gain, learning from heartbreak, crying because a child spontaneously hugs your neck. Love is the greatest inconvenience of all, and now we may avoid it entirely.
Americans have an Achilles’ heel, he realizes. Americans are too distracted by and dependent on technology. They have lost connection with the real
world. It seems so glaringly and deceptively simple, but perhaps it is true. Their defense against warfare is supreme, the best in the world; but their defense against their own selves is weak. It is too tantalizingly easy--but it must work, he continues in his train of thought. Robbed of their technology, on what will they rely?
An electromagnetic pulse is caused by a nuclear explosion that detonates in the atmosphere, rendering useless the power grid. The higher in the atmosphere the detonation, the more widespread the results. It is one of the few events that would have not just disastrous, but totally catastrophic consequences. The United States’ integrated and interlocked critical national infrastructure is particularly susceptible to this attack. All control, communication, implementation, storage and management that use electricity would be incapacitated. Nearly all U.S. civilian systems use electronic methods; the basic supply and distribution of water, food, and fuel, as well as communications, transport, emergency services, financial transactions, government services, business, international and domestic trade, all depend heavily on the existence of the electrical grid. The detonation of an EMP would cause extreme damage to the very core of most U.S. infrastructure, from which recovery would be uncertain.
We peer through the lens as the earth laboriously turns, like a slumbering, groggy giant. Now the western hemisphere is approaching dusk. As the shadow encroaches, our fears are confirmed; Mexico, South America, Canada all glow with the electric web emerging, but the United States is as black as midnight.
PART 2
THE SURVIVORS
12. By the Light of the Moon
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”