by Jeff Carlson
The group strode past her building on West 6th Street, continuing east with the wind. Emily smacked the glass again. She flicked her light on and off, on and off.
One man noticed her flashlight from the corner of his eye. He rocked his head in that odd motion, sharing two words with his friends. Two sounds. No more. In unison, they turned to stare at her. Emily froze, unsure if she’d made a mistake.
She saw now that all of them were armed. Each man held a hunk of wood, a long pole, or a tire iron.
The boy was their leader. Lean, light-haired, he stayed in front, his head shifting alertly as the group walked through the cars.
As they moved closer, Emily realized with a chill that some of their clubs were bloodied. Red spatters covered one man’s chest. Another’s cheek was smeared. Who had they been fighting? More gang members?
Emily was still making sense of the gore on their crude weapons when she brought her hand to her mouth, overwhelmed by the most acute shock of all.
The boy in front was her nephew, P.J.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
The change in Earth’s magnetic field seemed to be increasing. That was Marcus’s first thought as he shook off the effects of another interrupt. This time he’d lost two hours. His watch was gone, but he was able to judge how long he’d blacked out by the daylight streaming through the window. It was midafternoon.
Marcus put his hand against the wall to steady himself, dripping with sweat. He was in one of the offices. The desk had been overturned and there was paperwork scattered on the floor beside the computer monitor, keyboard, phone, and two couch cushions from the lounge.
Something else didn’t match. Marcus saw three phone cords looped neatly on the carpet with a thicker, darker computer line—but this room only had one phone. He also thought he smelled Janet, his ex. The scent was rich and feminine, and he was embarrassed to discover he was sexually aroused. That was a part of his life he’d neglected in recent years.
“Hey!” he yelled, wondering where the others had gone. Silence. Then he heard a faint tik, tik tik like footsteps. The noise surrounded him.
Tik.
The sound lifted the hair on the back of his neck. Was there someone creeping in the hall? On the roof?
Marcus bent to grab the desk lamp. Its shade had been torn off when the room was trashed, and the bulb was shattered. Now the short lamp made a good club.
Tik tik.
He couldn’t explain what was happening. He’d expected massive geomagnetic storms, but not unconsciousness—except he hadn’t been unconscious. He seemed to walk and act during the interrupts without memory of what he’d done.
Suddenly he lowered his weapon. The “footsteps” were the sound of the station expanding in the heat. The prefab building was mostly aluminum and plastic, but it had wood facades that were swelling in the sun.
The temperature had risen significantly. Ten degrees? More?
He felt nauseous. His left shoulder throbbed and his hand ached. Was this a precursor to a heart attack? The interrupts might be especially difficult for a man like himself, a middle-aged desk jockey.
That smell… His brain was misfiring, generating tricks of memory and other sensory illusions. Janet wasn’t here.
Where was Roell?!?
The thought cut through Marcus like a bullet. He lurched across the room to the door. The hall was dark. Marcus padded softly on the carpet, afraid, but then he rejected the feeling.
“Steve!” he yelled. “Kym!”
Had he called Roell before the first interrupt? Any kind of warning would have been better than none.
Roell probably hadn’t made it halfway home. The drive down to Janet’s house in Palo Alto would have taken four or five hours depending on traffic. With luck, Roell hadn’t been so badly hit. The phenomenon wouldn’t be the same everywhere. Marcus believed the interrupts occurred in pulses dependent upon a complex interaction between the flares, the solar wind, and the Earth’s magnetic field.
He needed to get to a working phone and a car. If there was any chance he could find his son, he’d take it.
Where were his keys? Steve’s might be in his room. Kym had kept her BlackBerry in her desk. The thought gave Marcus direction, and he increased his pace an instant before he stopped and stared.
The station lounge was filled with perks like Blu-ray and Wii, the big couch, the Ping-Pong table, and free soft drinks and snacks, all provided by Doug Hoffman, the dot com gazillionaire who’d put up half of the funding for the array.
The lounge had been destroyed. The door to the small entry room was propped open by the TV, which lay on the floor, and the couch was stripped. The vending machines’ glass faces were smashed open. Why? The machines were rigged to dispense everything for free, but even if he’d been gathering supplies before the last interrupt, why bother with tiny bags of chips and candy? There was real food in the kitchen and in the two ranch homes on-site.
Someone had flown into a rage in this place.
Marcus Wolsinger stared at his own hands as a slow breeze pushed through the doors and touched him, invading the building with heat and dust. The knuckles of his left hand were swollen. He was right-handed, but there were small cuts on that palm, too, and his shoulder and back hurt down to his tailbone. Was he responsible for the vandalism himself?
“Steve!” he yelled.
A footstep whispered in the shadows behind him. Marcus whirled, raising his fists.
Agent Drayer looked shaken and angry. Her jacket was gone and her blouse was ruffled, missing two buttons. Marcus saw a faint dab of red at her nostril. She’d had a nosebleed.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
Her tone set him off. Her voice was accusing, as if the interrupts were his fault. “I don’t know,” he said.
“I thought I heard someone outside,” she said.
“It’s the station settling in the heat.”
“I heard voices. There’s a house across the field, right?”
I sent Roell away because of you, Marcus thought. He would have kept his son here if the NSA hadn’t arrived, and then maybe Roell would be safe. They’d be together.
“We should—” Drayer said.
Marcus walked away. She could stay or go. He didn’t care. But as he eased through the glass, a crumpled shape in the entry room turned his head. Just as the door from the lounge into the entry room was propped open by the TV, the entry room’s door to the outside was held open by a body. Marcus cringed, feeling cold despite the hot wind.
The TV concealed most of the body except for its hand. The fingers were white. They looked like a man’s.
“What do you see?” Drayer asked.
She walked after Marcus as he altered his course.
What if the man was Steve?
Marcus shaded his eyes as he neared the lounge’s windows. Maybe the man on the floor should have been more important, but his gaze was drawn outside.
The sky was too bright, nearly cloudless except for a thin white membrane with vast bowls and gaps punched through it. Ferocious storms were alive in the atmosphere. Marcus wondered how long he had before the turbulence rocked downward and scoured the low peaks of the Coast Range. The land was baking with thermals. This close to the cooling expanse of the Pacific, would they see tornadoes or hurricanes?
He was relieved to find the body was one of Drayer’s soldiers. Drayer knelt to check the man’s vital signs, revealing a hideous contusion on the side of his face. He’d been struck so hard the skin had split in several places. The cheekbone beneath had caved in, yet there was very little blood. The man must have died instantly.
Drayer glanced left and right. She was looking for his assailant or maybe the weapon that had killed him. Marcus was more interested in the soldier’s gun belt. The holster was empty. The man’s shoes had been stolen, too, which was weird.
Marcus stepped past the body. The sky was mesmerizing. He bumped against the wall when he started down the handicapped access ramp.
> Then the railing zapped him. “Ah!” he shouted.
“Are you all right?” Drayer asked.
“Don’t touch it. Static charge.”
“What does—”
Marcus strode toward the cars lined up alongside the building. If Drayer didn’t get it—if one warning wasn’t enough—too bad.
Every step felt like a mile beneath the hellish sky. Again and again he squinted back at the station’s door, feeling vulnerable and lost. The third car was his own. The silver Accord was four years old, his one luxury since the divorce. He didn’t have his keys in his pocket, but he’d kept a spare in a magnetic box hidden inside the rear bumper.
Marcus didn’t reach for it. The solar flares were putting enough energy into the planet’s surface that metal objects were storing electrical charges, especially those insulated from the ground like vehicles on rubber tires.
How many joules could the steel frame of a car absorb? That would depend on the duration and strength of the flares. But he saw a solution.
Five cardboard boxes sat against the station, supplies unloaded by Drayer’s team, possibly food or camping gear. The contents couldn’t have been too important because the boxes had been left outside.
His shoulder protested as he yanked at the nearest box, ripping three feet of cardboard from the lid.
“What are you doing?” Drayer called.
Then he returned to his car. A lizard scurried out from beneath it. The dry fields of the array were home to squirrels, rabbits, birds, and these swift little reptiles—but the lizard was sluggish, even crippled. Its legs twitched as it tried to run. Was that a coincidence? Or was this lizard also suffering some lasting effect of the interrupts?
Distracted, Marcus nearly laid his hand on the car.
He jerked back. Stupid! he thought. Everything is different now. Don’t be stupid.
He needed to prevent his body from becoming a conduit for the charge. The rubber in his shoes was probably enough to protect him, but if it wasn’t? If he burned?
Marcus felt fresh beads of sweat pop out of his skin as he set his cardboard down and knelt on it. He reached under the bumper and felt along the warm steel.
Nothing happened.
With his key safely in hand, he stood up and glanced at the thousands of dishes spread across the terrain. Most of their lines ran underground, and the dishes themselves were hardened against electromagnetic radiation, but how much could they take before they short-circuited?
Hopefully the pulse had been its most intense in the mountains, sparing Roell and the largest cities. If the phenomenon had hit lower elevations, if Roell had driven far enough to reach the Bay Area, the danger he faced would be infinitely worse. Metal doors and stairwells, power lines, fences, every one of these things was a potential hazard, some dissipating their charges into the earth, others storing it like lightning.
Marcus placed his cardboard by the driver door and stepped onto it. Then he entered the car, making certain to keep his shoe on the cardboard until he lifted his foot after himself.
Drayer was watching. Did she realize how far apart they really were? If he grabbed his cardboard, he could stop her from getting into the car unless she ripped off another piece. Even that wouldn’t do her any good as soon as he was moving…
The engine wouldn’t start.
Marcus tried the ignition six times, but the battery or the starter was dead. More likely, the Accord’s computer chips were fried.
He didn’t need to decide whether or not to take Drayer along. He stepped out onto his cardboard. The two government sedans were much older than his car, maybe ten years older. They would have less electronics, which meant he might get one running.
“Do you have your keys?” he called.
Drayer shook her head. What was she doing? Going through her pockets? No. She’d touched her belly like she was ill.
Marcus walked closer. Drayer stepped back. Confused by her reaction, Marcus held up his hands. Did she think he’d grab her?
“Will someone come for you?” he asked. “More agents or soldiers?”
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe. This isn’t a localized event, is it? Is this happening everywhere?”
“That’s right.”
“They’ll be overwhelmed,” she said. “If it’s nationwide… We’re in the middle of nowhere. I wouldn’t hold your breath for a helicopter if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m going to the control room,” he said.
The station didn’t seem to provide any proof against the phenomenon. The walls were too thin. But the world outside was hot and bright. Marcus preferred the shadows.
At the top of the ramp, he summoned enough dispassion to search the dead man’s pockets for keys or a phone. He found nothing. Drayer made a gesture as if to carry the body inside, but the shattered glass on the floor was treacherous even without lugging the man’s weight. Marcus’s shoulder hurt too much, and Drayer was too small. Not like Roell.
Roell hated school and he had trouble with his father, but he was made for physical challenges. As early as Under 7 soccer, Roell had been taller and faster than anyone else on the field, most of them Caucasian. Some parents questioned whether he wasn’t actually nine or ten. They were so upset they said this in Janet’s hearing, implying that she’d lied about Roell’s age to let him compete against smaller kids.
It was no coincidence that 65 percent of NFL players and more than 80 percent of the NBA were African-American when African-Americans made up less than 13 percent of the U.S. population. Blacks had evolved on wide-open plains. They were built for running—for long-range hunting and war—whereas whites had adapted to the comparatively close-in environment of Europe’s mountains and ice. Blacks often possessed greater musculature and stamina. Marcus was glad now for any advantage for his son.
They entered the control room. It hadn’t been demolished like the lounge, but even their backup power was out. He had no success with the emergency batteries or the generator system. The phone was no good, either.
Drayer put the handset back in its cradle and said, “Do you have a cell phone?”
Marcus had found Kym’s BlackBerry. “It’s dead.”
“We should look for mine.”
“Do it. Go.”
“You need to help me,” she said.
“I’m busy.” Marcus walked to the electronics room. He opened the door to absolute darkness, letting in a dim shaft of light. The room was a twenty-by-forty windowless box lined with racks of signal converters and other hardware. It was the strongest room in the station, a cinder-block vault.
It also functioned as a Faraday cage. Their construction crews had embedded the walls and ceiling with layer upon layer of chicken wire and 5mm copper sheeting to shield the array from the electromagnetic noise created by the systems inside.
If the electronics room would protect him from the interrupts, a Mac sat in the corner as well as the laptop plugged into their servers by the NSA. Marcus needed to restore power with their generators. Then he’d have everything he required for command applications. Outside, the dishes themselves acted as passive receivers. Except for their signal amplifiers and repositioning motors, the dishes needed no electricity—and the interrupts were so strong, amplifiers were unnecessary. Nor was there any reason to realign the dishes since Earth was engulfed by the phenomenon.
With the electronics room up and running, Marcus could make the array live again.
But my son, he thought. My God, my son.
Roell might be lost to him. If people everywhere had been unconscious, there would be unattended stovetops. Even if the cities weren’t consumed by fire, millions of refugees would separate Marcus from Roell.
He was unable to call or text. Their cars wouldn’t start. He could hike down from the mountains to search for his son, but the nearest town of any size was thirty miles away. Hiking that far might take two or three days, even weeks if he lost his mind with each interrupt.
If anyone will
survive, it’s Roell, he thought. He’s young. Strong.
His other option was to sift through the solar activity for a pattern. He might be able to predict the next interrupt. Forecasts could be the best way to help Roell. If they reestablished communications… if Drayer’s people came for them…
Marcus didn’t dare plan any further, because he knew in his heart that if the phenomenon didn’t stop, he was unlikely to see his child again.
Drayer had followed him to the door.
“We should be safe in here,” Marcus said. “This room is heavily shielded.”
“You think it’s coming back,” she said.
Marcus avoided her gaze, unwilling to waste time convincing her. He moved to the nearest rack and began stacking the smallest components. This room would be especially crowded if they found Steve or the others, but they needed to carry inside food, water, lights, a bucket for a toilet, and as many phones as they could grab in case service was restored.
“What happened to us the last time?” Drayer asked. “Do you remember?” Her voice was hard again—accusing—but when Marcus looked up, her eyes were afraid.
“No,” he said.
She stared at him. Then she nodded. “I’ll look for my phone. Car keys. How long do we have before it happens again?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.”
Drayer left and Marcus brooded as he worked alone, struggling to tamp down his relentless guilt.
I’ll find you, he promised his son.
LOS ANGELES
Emily stood transfixed as P.J. reached up and tapped on the window with his bloody crowbar. The tinted glass was all that separated them, but P.J. wasn’t looking at her. He watched the tip of his weapon, his blue eyes smoldering.
Four men stood behind him. Each one held his head down, chin to chest, eyes up. It was a predatory look, dangerous and strange, and yet their faces were utterly calm.