The pale-yellow house had a Spanish flair, trimmed with white and capped with a terra-cotta tile roof. A portico—composed of square masonry columns and a soaring archway—framed wrought-iron doors and jutted from the house, flanked by recessed replicas of itself.
Home. That all-consuming thought had staved off the onslaught of questions. Why is my car dead? And my cellphone? When will life return to normal?
A twinge of nausea blossomed.
A reflexive response to the unanswered questions? she wondered. Or just hunger? After all, it was almost four o’clock, and she hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
As Kyle unlocked the front door, waning sunlight shined against his sandy-brown hair, highlighting an inkling of gray at his temple. At forty-eight, he was a handsome man with an irresistible crooked smile and thoughtful green eyes that still spoke to her in concepts beyond words.
“I’d better go tell Bradley that Will left,” he said.
Jessie shook her head in a mocking reprimand. “So, are you more worried about Bradley? Or the terrorists?”
“Hard to say.”
14
KYLE CRAMMED THE LAST bite of hamburger into his mouth, taking in the view from George’s deck. Usually, the breeze rustling through the wooded hillside and shimmers of fading light playing over the lake relaxed him. Not today.
“Thank you for dinner, George,” Jessie said, nudging Kyle’s foot beneath the table until he echoed his appreciation.
“And thank you,” George said, “for the salad.”
Despite the day’s insanity, Jessie had stubbornly insisted on decorum. “I refuse to go there empty-handed,” she had said. “We’ll have to bring something.”
That turned out to be a formidable task since they had purged the refrigerator in preparation for the caterer’s arrival. Still, his headstrong wife had triumphed.
“There would’ve been more lettuce,” Jessie was saying, “if I could keep the damned rabbits out of my garden.”
The world is self-destructing, and they’re babbling about rabbits? Kyle thought. How long can they pretend nothing’s wrong?
Unable to tolerate the inane conversation, he grabbed an uneaten remnant of Abby’s hamburger bun and descended the deck stairs toward the fishpond in George’s backyard.
Kyle tossed a bread fragment into the water and watched the tranquil fish mutate into aggressive rivals. Mouths chomping, tails flailing and thrashing one another, they converged. Water splashed and rippled over the pond. Floating plants bobbed and swayed, the entire environment knocked out of balance by a single crumb of food. Sighing, he lobbed the remaining bread into the pond, bit by bit; then he returned to the table.
Un-freaking-believable, he thought. “Phones are out, cars are dead, it’s raining 747s, and Orlando is burning,” he shouted. “And you’re still talking about lettuce?”
Bradley drained the remainder of his soda then ended the uneasy silence. “I think it may have been an EMP.”
Kyle heard Abby say, “An electromagnetic pulse? Oh shit!”
“Abigail!” In the midst of his prolonged glare, a silent lecture on inappropriate language, the realization struck with dreadful clarity. Kyle’s teenaged daughter understood; and he didn’t. He felt vulnerable and inept. How could he protect his family if he had no idea what was happening?
“What, exactly, is an electromagnetic pulse?” Jessie asked, sparing him the indignity.
“It’s a cascade of electrons in the atmosphere, like a giant lightning strike that can fry anything with a computer chip. That’s why your car was dead. And Will’s 1970s truck was running.”
“Then this is a natural disaster?” Jessie asked.
“There are two ways it could happen.” Bradley underscored the statement unfurling two fingers. “A solar flare, which would be natural. Or somebody popped a high-altitude nuke.”
“Nuclear? As in radiation and fallout?” Jessie asked, the pitch of her voice rising with alarm.
“No, no.” George patted her wrist to calm her and threw a questioning glance at Bradley. “The blast just knocks the electrons around.”
Jessie blinked in confusion. “It was a twenty-mile-wide lightning strike from Windermere to Sugar Lake?”
Fingers tapping against the table, Bradley said, “Our power grid is a 200,000-mile-long antenna, which sucked in all those electrons and channeled them right into the transformers.”
Anxiety was a siren screaming through Kyle’s nervous system. “Are you saying we won’t have power for weeks?”
George gave Bradley a long stare and said, “A solar flare triggered a geomagnetic storm that hit Quebec in the late 1980s. They had power back in nine hours.”
The Marine’s brow arched in astonishment. “That storm didn’t damage vehicles. Solar flares don’t produce the fastest, most destructive E1 wave.”
“Well, if it was an EMP,” Abby said, “the whole country might be screwed. That’s what happened in my video game.”
George rose to his feet. “There’s no sense borrowing trouble. We’re home. And our bellies are full. Let’s be grateful and get a good night’s sleep.”
15
WILL KNEW BRADLEY WOULD be angry, but not nearly as much as Heather. His wife despised his best friend; and although Bradley never admitted it, Will was fairly certain the sentiment was mutual.
Driving along County Road 455, he glimpsed a patch of orange streaking through the trees.
Hunters? he thought.
The two men spotted his truck and changed course, running toward him. Will slowed to offer them a ride, a mutually beneficial gesture. The hunters would get home faster, and he would have extra hands to help clear blocked intersections.
As the men closed within fifty yards, Will jammed on the accelerator pedal.
They weren’t hunters. They were wearing orange jumpsuits, escaped criminals from a local prison.
Will slalomed between abandoned vehicles nearly clipping a white Audi; and even after the convicts were a safe distance behind, his hands continued to shake. Maybe Bradley wasn’t overreacting when he asked George for the handgun.
He retraced his original path, taking advantage of previously cleared intersections until he reached Winter Garden. He moved five vehicles manually then began pushing them out of the way with his truck, too tired to care about superficial damage.
By the time he arrived at his apartment complex, twilight had given way to a murky orange haze, exacerbated by fires just ten blocks to the east. The stench of burning rubber hung thick in the air. Will could taste the smoke, acrid and overpowering.
He killed the ignition and popped the hood of the truck. Will removed a small wire that connected the ignition coil to the distributor, ensuring that his truck would not vanish into the night, then he hurried into the apartment building.
He stumbled through the hallway, which was even darker than the parking lot, and dragged a hand along the wall, counting doorways, wishing he had grabbed a flashlight from his toolbox. He unlocked the door to his apartment and said, “Heather? It’s me.”
His wife was sitting on the floor, sobbing. Through wavering candlelight, he noticed the bottle of vodka beside her. “Did you get the kids from the babysitter?”
She continued bawling without response, and Will snatched a candle from the coffee table and jogged toward the bedrooms. Billy, his two-year-old son, and Suzanne, his infant daughter, were both asleep. Exhaling with relief, he tiptoed into the room and kissed both their foreheads.
How would today’s events impact their future? How would he feed, clothe, and protect them?
Hearing Billy cough transported him back to the present. How do I keep them from inhaling this noxious smoke? Bradley’s house came to mind. Somehow, he had to convince Heather.
He returned to the family room, sat on the floor beside his wife, and said, “We need to leave.”
Heather’s hazel eyes rolled upward. “Let’s go to my sister’s in Georgia.”
“Georgia?” he rep
eated. “Heather, it’s really bad out there.”
“Don’t ... lecture me,” she said, her tone tipsy and belligerent. “I saw doctors and nurses getting gunned down at the hospital.”
She reached for the bottle of vodka, and Will wrestled it from her. “Come on, Heather, you’re not supposed to drink while nursing.”
“Then take me to Georgia. Now!”
“The roads are congested with stalled cars. Georgia’s not realistic. It took me hours just to get from Sugar—”
He stopped himself—too late.
“Sugar Lake?” she shouted. “Bradley’s back? That’s why you were so late?”
“Listen, things are a lot calmer there. And his grandfather invited—”
“There’s no way in hell I’m going to Bradley Webber’s house!” Heather jumped to her feet and stomped away, her double chin jiggling, her muddy-brown ponytail wagging with resentment. “If you won’t take me to Georgia, I swear, I’ll take Billy and Suzanne and go myself!”
16
AFTER SAYING GOOD-NIGHT to the Murphys, Bradley followed Gramps into the kitchen. The glass sliding door had barely clicked shut when his frustration erupted. “Why are you sugarcoating this?”
He heard Gramps sigh then strike a match, lighting two emergency candles from his hurricane kit. “Listen, Jessie and Kyle are already traumatized.” Gramps paused to pick up both candles. “I need them focused on today because that’s all they can handle right now. Not tomorrow, next week, or next month. The last thing I need is for them to panic.”
“How is it helpful to let them keep living in a world that no longer exists?”
“How is it helpful to induce panic?” Gramps’ eyes flashed angrily through the dim light. Then he shuffled toward his office.
“There has to be middle ground between panic and false hope.” Bradley followed after him. Unanswered questions accumulated in his mind, roiling, spawning even more questions. Was the country at war? How the hell was he supposed to report for duty? And how could he leave his eighty-year-old grandfather to fend for himself?
“Son, without hope people give up. They need some time to—”
“Time is a luxury I can’t afford,” Bradley said, his tone sharper than intended. A restless silence stretched between them, his grandfather’s gaze probing for the source of his impatience.
Finally, Gramps handed both candles to Bradley then slowly settled onto a chair beside an old metal footlocker that served as a coffee table.
Through the flickering light, Bradley watched his grandfather sort through its contents: two flashlights, a set of walkie-talkies, a laser boresighter, a generation II nightscope from their boar hunting days—God, he missed that.
“Ah, there it is.” Gramps removed a radio and a small inverter. “I bought these after Hurricane Wilma.”
A soft click punctuated his sentence, then Gramps said, “Dang it. Batteries must be dead.”
“Or the pulse fried the radio,” Bradley added.
“Do me a favor? Take this flashlight and head over to the Levins’ boat. We need to borrow the battery.”
“Mr. Levin will have a conniption—”
“You let me handle him.”
Charles and Terri Levin, the uppity couple as Bradley called them, lived at the end of the cul-de-sac. Their single-story house backed up to a wooded hillside rather than the lake, but the property included a narrow strip of lakefront land just wide enough for a boat dock.
Bradley made his way into the yard, darkness blurring the boundary between soil and water. To the southeast, patches of sky glowed grimy orange, and the breeze carried a hint of smoke.
A burst of guilt ripped through him, a double-edged blade of regret that would cut no matter what choice he made.
Who comes first? he asked himself. Family or country?
His father had made that choice long ago, and Bradley had hated him for it ever since. What kind of man deserts his terminally ill wife? Leaves his twelve-year-old son to watch his mother die? He could have taken an emergency leave, but elected to remain overseas. Admiral Richard Webber was not a brave hero. He was a freaking coward.
Bradley stepped onto the boat, flashlight sweeping the surface of the lake. Several reddish-orange eyes glinted back at him.
Gators, he thought. You guys might be dinner.
After disconnecting the battery, he tucked it beneath his arm and started back to the house. The phrase family or country resounded through him, and he grimaced. Either choice would lead to desertion, dishonor, and self-loathing.
Two points of light punctured the darkness, candles on Gramps’ deck. Bradley took a deep breath, as if inflating lungs could extinguish the emotional wildfire within him, and he hastened his stride, taking the deck stairs three at a time.
Gramps was sitting at the table, seemingly mesmerized by the candlelight, his furrowed forehead belying his outward calm.
“How could a nuke get past Aegis?” Bradley asked, referring to the country’s highly advanced ballistic missile defense system.
“Simple,” Gramps said as he connected the inverter and marine battery. “It wasn’t a ballistic missile.”
“The Iranian rocket launch?” Bradley asked. “Their first manned spacecraft in orbit?”
“The ultimate suicide bomber ... Or it could’ve been that North Korean satellite.”
“If either of those scenarios are true,” Bradley said, his voice hardening. “The entire country could be without power ... long-term.”
“Yee-yup.” Gramps plugged the radio’s electric cord into the inverter. After a muted snap, the radio hissed to life.
“Wow, it works,” Bradley said, not bothering to hide his surprise.
“My old metal footlocker must’ve shielded it from the pulse, like a makeshift Faraday cage.”
Bradley leaned toward the radio, eager for information, and at the same time, dreading it; but only the perpetual drone of white noise was propagating through the black night.
“This might actually be good news,” Gramps said. “Geomagnetic storms disrupt radio signals for extended periods. Maybe it was just a solar flare.”
“I doubt it.”
“So, what are your plans?”
Bradley recoiled at the question. “What am I supposed to do? Take a four-month, cross-county hike to Camp Pendleton?”
( ( ( 8% Complete ) ) )
( ( ( DAY 2 ) ) )
Saturday, February 15th
17
BRADLEY TRUDGED INTO Gramps’ garage, yawning. He hadn’t slept much. Questions, frustrations, responsibilities—they had woven themselves into a tight mesh, an emotional choke collar that fueled his insomnia.
I can’t believe Will skipped out, Bradley thought, rummaging through an old coffee can filled with nails. Doesn’t he understand that placating Heather is endangering his kids?
They were both oblivious to the consequences of long-term power failure; and even Gramps was suffering from denial, hiding behind the mantra of hope.
How am I supposed to report when he has his head shoved up his ass?
Worse still, the effects of Gramps’ age were more prominent. Training and military knowledge were not going to make up for his slow, shuffling gait or the tremors in his hands. Could Gramps still shoot? Bradley had his doubts.
Sighing, he picked out a dozen U-shaped nails and pocketed them. Mr. and Mrs. Murphy were great people, but unprepared to defend Gramps—or themselves for that matter; and Abby could put lead on paper, but that didn’t guarantee she could pull the trigger on a human target.
With his flashlight, Bradley began scanning the storage shelves adjacent to the water heater.
The Levins, he thought, they would be useless. Mr. Uppity had cowered at the sight of a paintball gun. What would he do if I handed him an AR-10? Bradley laughed, imagining it would necessitate a change of pants.
I need to get out there and see what’s happening, he decided, tossing items onto the floor of the garage: a plastic crate, two sprin
g-loaded mousetraps, a handful of cable ties, and a hammer.
18
CHARLES AWOKE IN HIS car, still inside the parking garage a block from American Federal Bank. That ogre with the S-Mart shopping bag had set the lobby ablaze minutes after he had returned from Starbucks. His employees had run off, a gaggle of cowards abandoning him; and as Regional Director, his first order of business would be to terminate them.
After considering all courses of action and weighing risk versus benefit, Charles had decided the fire extinguisher would be prudent. But by the time he had digested the instructions, the fire had swelled into an inferno; and the white powdery spray had only succeeded in soiling his suit.
Then a gang of men with monstrous black guns, nearly a yard in length, had descended on Abbott Street. Fearing for his life, Charles had fled to the sanctuary of his Jaguar F-TYPE convertible.
He had been waiting for hours, expecting firefighters to arrive and extinguish the flames, waiting for police to restore order. At some point, he must have fallen asleep.
The sky was beginning to brighten with traces of morning—or was that the ruddiness of flames? He climbed from the car, nose wrinkling at the heavy stench of burning petroleum products, most assuredly carcinogenic. Charles stretched, feeling achy and stiff. His stomach rumbled, a reminder that he had not eaten since yesterday’s breakfast—a Starbucks’ Espresso Macchiato, which also explained the relentless stabbing pain behind his eyes. It was the onset of a caffeine-withdrawal headache.
Lumbering through mental fogginess, Charles assessed his situation and concluded there were only two options. Remain here until law enforcement reclaimed control of Orlando or brave the imbeciles, arsonists, and mercenaries and drive home. Fleetingly, he thought of Terri. Should he venture after her? S-Mart was fifteen miles in the wrong direction, and he would have to pass through squalid areas, perilous even on a good day.
No, he decided. His wife was undoubtedly home, relaxing and swilling the last of his Merlot.
Powerless- America Unplugged Page 3