The word ‘quarantine’ had very negative imagery. It hadn’t been that long since the world had recovered from that pandemic. As if answering him, one of the talking heads on the TV said, “Officials could be worried about a terrorist threat, possibly chemical weapons.”
“Viral?”
“Nobody is saying that—”
I switched to CNN.
A bright red banner emblazoned with the words “Terror Alert” rolled across the screen. “We have raised the terrorist threat alert to the highest level,” said an announcer in the background.
“The CNN terror alert,” Chuck snorted. He waved his hands in the air and got up to go to the kitchen. “Scary.”
The image shifted to shaky handheld videos of fires. “Blazes have spread rapidly in California, engulfing the entire San Fernando Valley.” The picture changed to a view from a drone or an airplane. “And fires are out of control in Virginia as well. There have been stories circulating of bright lights in the sky before the new blazes started.” A man in a baseball cap and jeans, pointing at a green hillside, began recounting what he had seen.
“Holy cow.” Chuck returned and sat down. “Where, exactly?”
“Not sure.”
Susie brought out more coffee and some sandwiches. “Irena told me you guys saw a tornado.”
“Yeah, it was close,” I said.
“Not that close,” Chuck countered. “And it wasn’t that big.”
“Not that big?” I said incredulously.
Luke grabbed one of the sandwiches and began stuffing his face. The kid had a good appetite. Like his old man. Susie ruffled Luke’s hair and sat down next to me.
Irena joined us and squeezed in beside me. “How big do you need things to be in America? You even need tornadoes to be huge?” She turned to Chuck. “I don’t remember you yawning through it. In fact, I recall you—”
“I’m saying it wasn’t like Twister or something.”
“No emergency services,” I said. “Nobody showed up at all. Irena did first aid, and we ferried people to the hospital.”
Susie said, “What about the fire departments? The police? Losing imaging satellites must be making oversight on natural disasters tougher, and having cell phones stop working…”
“There are eighteen thousand US police agencies. That’s city police, county sheriffs, state and federal agencies,” Chuck said. “They’ll get their act together. This has just knocked them off their feet for a bit.”
I said, “Don’t police and emergency services still have VHF radio and line-of-sight radio? Person-to-person and digital mobile radio networks with base stations? All that should keep working, right?”
“Yeah, but having cell networks go down would eliminate their informal networks,” Damon said from the dining table. “And then their private systems become overwhelmed when ‘public’ cell comms go down.”
“But they would keep working to some degree, wouldn’t they?”
Damon shrugged. “But in rural areas, with no TV even? No landline, no mobile. Makes it very difficult to know what’s going on.”
“So no emergency services at all?”
“People have always got each other, but official channels have been caught flat footed with the speed of this. Either in the dark or overwhelmed.”
The TV shifted to images of rioting in streets. The announcer explained these were happening in Detroit after a huge power blackout. Images of empty store shelves.
“At least we’re not in the Big Apple this time,” Chuck said. “Better to be here.” He turned to Susie and said, “Let’s get the kids’ things packed up.”
“What about the fires?”
“We can drive around them. I promised Mike we’d get him to DC.”
The TV shifted to videos of roadblocks, but not manned by National Guardsmen or State Troopers. “Local militia groups have taken control of towns throughout the Midwest,” said an announcer.
“That must be what the cop was talking about,” I said. “You sure you want to drive through that?”
“The Seventh Fleet has been recalled to bases in the Philippines,” said the announcer on CNN. “With disrupted satellite comms, the navy is on high alert for possible attacks, and sporadic contact with nuclear submarines has left—”
The news anchor paused, then said, “We have a report from the Russian authorities that their bases in Tajikistan have detected high levels of airborne radioactivity, signaling possible evidence of nuclear detonations in the Kashmir region.”
“See? The further away we are from civilization, the better. We’re going,” Chuck said to me. He stood, then turned and said, “Damon, come with me.”
The garage smelled of rubber and gasoline. Naked neon tubes twenty feet overhead bathed the cement floor in stark light. The only car was a Mini Cooper parked in the far bay. Susie’s car, Chuck said before I could ask. He led us down the wooden stairs to a refrigerator and pulled out three beers. He opened them and handed one each to me and Damon.
“Cheers,” he said.
We clinked bottles.
I said, “What’s up?”
He had obviously led us out there for some privacy.
“What in the heck is going on?” Chuck asked.
“I mean, the internet is still working, and the mobile networks are still up in South Korea,” Damon said. “Most of the BieDou GNSS satellites and the QZSS from Japan seem to be working—”
“I don’t mean out there.” Chuck jabbed a finger at Damon. “I mean you. What the hell are you doing?”
“Ah…” Damon was confused.
“You told that State Trooper you were going to school with Terek and Irena. Said you’d known them for years.”
“Technically, that’s not a lie. I’ve known Terek for about a year, and Irena was going to Boston University, so we were going to school together in Boston.”
“She’s finished.”
“I mean last year—”
“And Terek is not in school with you.”
“He should be. I’m getting him into MIT next year. He’s smarter than—”
“You don’t lie to the police. Not at a checkpoint, especially when they’re looking for something. Are you insane? If they had questioned you, we might all be in some lockup getting our colons inspected.”
I stood between them. “Hey, it’s okay. He wasn’t lying. He was stretching the truth.”
“Did you hear that hick trooper?” Damon said. “Isn’t Ukrainian the same as Russian? You know what southern cops do to immigrants? I didn’t want them stuck in some detention center.”
“Southern?” Chuck replied. “That’s bordering on an insult, friend. And that wouldn’t have happened.” He said it somewhat unconvincingly, though.
“Have you seen the news? It’s already happening.”
I said, “Did you see the way Irena helped those people in that town in Mississippi? Are we really going back to what happened last time? And Terek? The kid—”
“I know, I know. He saved your life.” Chuck’s expression softened. He eyed Damon in a way I’d seen a hundred times before. He grinned. “Do you have a thing for his sister? Because, I mean…”
“Do you?”
Chuck’s smile widened. “I was impressed by her SIG Sauer.” He leaned over and entered a code into a keypad on a gun safe. The lock chimed. He pulled a three-foot-long weapon from inside. “Nothing compared to Black Beauty, though.”
Guns made me nervous, something Chuck knew only too well, which made him enjoy showing them to me even more. He’d told me about his AR-15, had been talking about it on the way here as if it were his third child.
“Is that loaded?” I asked.
“Course not. But what I really mean”—his smile became a naughty grin—“is not yet.”
CHAPTER 20
LAUREN PRESSED HER face against the airplane window and did her best to look straight down. Black water glittered in the moonlight, the ocean waves rolling under a starless sky. The pane of c
arbonite plastic was cool against her burning cheeks.
She clutched her purse tight in white-knuckled fists.
The cabin lights were low. The man in the pod across from her recited the Lord’s Prayer, his head bowed. A male flight attendant pulled out the jump seat in the galley beyond the bulkhead. The man’s arms gripped the waist of another attendant as he slid to sit down. He sobbed and burst into tears.
Her hands trembling, Lauren took a picture of Luke and Olivia from her purse. “I love you so much,” she whispered. Tears streamed down her face.
Outside the window, the waves edged closer. Ghosts rolled and rolled in the swells.
“Mike, I’m so sorry, I should never—”
The familiar background vibration and noise of the cabin changed in pitch. Like something settling. The engines had stopped. Silence. Whistling wind. Moans of terror. The plane dropped.
“Brace, brace, brace,” came the captain’s terse instructions.
Lauren glanced once more out the window at the endless black water, then at picture of Luke and Olivia clutched in her fingers. She ducked her head down to her knees.
A flash of white—
I awoke from the dream in a lurch, almost jumping from the bed.
It took me a few seconds, bedsheets clutched in my balled fists, to remember that I was in Chuck and Susie’s spare bedroom. The blinds were down, a thin gray light weakly illuminating a work desk scattered with papers. On the wall at the foot of the bed was that picture of dogs playing poker, which Susie hated but Chuck could never let go of.
But the nightmare wasn’t over.
My wife.
Still breathing hard, I took a few lungfuls to calm my heart. And where was Luke? On the floor was a blowup mattress, but no sign of him. Outside in the hallway, a shriek, but then a laugh and little footsteps racing away.
I gripped the railing on the stairs to make sure I wouldn’t slip on the hardwood in my socks. Still unsteady and bleary-eyed, the dream of Lauren crashing wrapped tight around my awakening brain.
Tired. Beyond exhausted.
I hadn’t slept more than three hours. Maybe not even one. I made my way carefully down the stairs.
Chuck and Susie’s house was a sprawling two-level, with an open atrium in the center at least twenty feet high. The guest rooms were on the second level with the kids’ rooms and playroom.
Chuck was already up—had never gone to sleep?—and was in the kitchen at the far end of the open atrium cooking something on the gas range. Luke was chasing Bonham, who shrieked and ducked around the kitchen island. Ellarose ran after them both.
“Flapjacks and bacon?” Chuck asked as he saw me coming down.
“Coffee first,” I replied. He poured me a cup. “Nothing from Lauren?”
He shook his head.
Their landline was still working, so I had tried the Seymour residence a few times last night, but hadn’t managed to get through. Emails and the internet were still working, so I’d sent messages. No responses so far.
“Don’t any of you sleep?” I said to nobody in particular.
Susie and Irena were on the couch in front of the TV, curled up together and chatting under a blanket. Chuck liked to set the air conditioning to arctic. Damon and Terek, predictably, were on their laptops, connected together on the kitchen table.
“The American and European militaries are unable to confirm the radioactive readings coming from the Russians,” a blond reporter said on the TV set above the fireplace. “But imaging from one Russian satellite seems to indicate that…”
I took a sip of hot coffee and luxuriated for a moment in the sensation of it hitting my throat, the warmth of it seeping into me. Sighing, I went to the side table in the hallway and picked up the handset from the cradle, then opened my phone to find the number. I dialed the Seymours’ number in DC. It was 8 a.m. there, one hour behind us.
“Hello?”
“This is the Seymour residence…”
I gently put down the receiver and considered calling again, but turned and went to the couches by the TV. I sat on the one opposite Susie and Irena.
I asked, “Anything new I should know about?”
“The Russians managed to launch a new global positioning satellite overnight,” Susie said. “It passed the debris field into an orbit higher up. They were recalibrating it to provide a signal, they said, but then they lost it almost right away.”
“They’re offering to provide location data to the American military,” Irena added.
“Fat chance we’ll take them up on that,” Chuck said from the kitchen. “Pancakes?” He waved a plate.
I wasn’t sure when I’d last eaten. My stomach growled. “Sounds great.” I got up from the couch.
Terek came to join me on a stool at the kitchen island. Damon mumbled something and went into the hallway. I heard him pick up the phone.
Luke ran up and wrapped his arms around my waist. “You okay, dad?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
When had he become the one taking care of me? “You had breakfast?”
He held up two fingers. “That many pancakes.”
Chuck deposited some flapjacks and bacon on plates in front of Terek and me. “Sleep okay?”
“As can be expected.”
“Maple syrup?” Chuck asked.
“Does the pope?”
“I figured.” He retrieved a bottle from the fridge. “Terek, I saw you praying at the church in Mississippi.” Chuck took a stool next to us. “You’re Christian?”
“Faith is very important to us,” Terek said around his first mouthful of pancake.
“Us too,” Chuck said. “We go every Sunday, to a big evangelical mission around the corner.”
“My sister makes me go each Sunday as well.” Terek smiled at Irena.
“He makes me sound like a monster,” she said in response.
“No, I like it,” Terek said. “My grandmother, she always, I mean, after our mother…” His voice faded.
“I heard,” Chuck said, his voice softer. “I’m sorry.”
Terek put his fork down. He shrugged. “It seems another lifetime, but then also like yesterday. Irena took care of me after our mother passed. She had just gotten out of the army.”
“I lost both my parents,” Chuck said. “Car accident.”
“I am sorry to hear this.”
“It was a long time ago.”
Terek nodded, picked up his fork. Prodded the pancakes.
“What denomination are you?” Chuck asked.
“Eastern Orthodox. Wait, but is that a denomination? I don’t know.”
“I get it.”
The voice of the TV news announcer: “Russia is now offering to send aid to the United States as power outages continue rolling across the country. This has shades of six years ago, when the CyberStorm…”
Terek pushed at a chunk of pancake. “The Russians, the Soviets, tried to take away our religion. My grandmother was forced to stop attending the church, many years before. They boarded it up.” He waved a fork at the TV. “You should not trust them.”
“That’s terrible,” Chuck said. “And I don’t.”
In the hallway, Damon was talking to someone on the phone.
The image on the TV shifted to a view of the New York harbor. “Ships coming into port are being held up,” the news anchor said. “The entire logistics network has ground to a halt. Shipping companies have lost track of containers and shipments.”
Damon reappeared. “Same thing Grandma Babet is saying.”
“You talked to her?” I asked.
“Just now.”
“And?”
“She says that the Port of Louisiana is in total chaos. They can’t track anything. They’re unloading ships and opening everything up. They’re trying to get perishables in first. Almost back to pencil and paper.”
“Things will still get through?”
Damon sat back down at his laptop. “They’ll adapt, I’m sure, but it
might take months.”
I finished my pancakes, then grabbed the remote and switched to CNN. The screen filled with images of burning forests.
“The Daniel Boone wilderness is now ablaze,” said a TV anchor, a black-haired woman with dark skin. “Fire crews and emergency response teams are hampered by the lack of satellite imaging and loss of communications. They are now flying over affected areas and taking pictures with their cell phones, then physically taking those phones down to the ground and explaining where the photos were taken. As you can imagine, this is a chaotic process. Witnesses are reporting multiple new blazes, possibly caused by what some are referring to as fire falling from the sky. The flames have now spread from the Pennington Gap…”
“That’s the tristate,” Chuck said. He walked in front of the TV with a pad of paper in his hand. “The Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail runs through Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia.”
“Is that near your cabin?” I asked.
“Five hundred miles from it, but not more than a hundred miles from here.”
“Explains the haze outside.” The air had been thick the night before, and not only with humidity.
“But we better take a more northerly route to be safe,” Chuck said. “Up around Lexington.”
“Are you sure you still want to go?”
“Stuff like this is what I keep that cabin for. Besides, we gotta get you to Washington. I bet Lauren will be waiting for you.”
“Chuck,” Susie whispered under her breath.
“What?”
“Don’t say things like that.” She glanced around to see where Luke was.
“It’s what I think,” Chuck said. “Glass half full. Optimism. It doesn’t hurt.”
“Now you’re the optimist?”
“He might be right,” Damon said from in front of his laptop. “A lot of the international flights over open water were redirected into national airports, even after airspaces were closed. Maybe she’s in Canada, though.”
“I’d take Canada.”
“Everyone, finish up your breakfast. We have a busy day. We need to go to my restaurants and collect some food for the trip.”
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