by Jack Colrain
“It’s Ava,” she choked out. “It’s Ava Talbot—”
The line went dead.
Everything went dead.
“No! No, no!” he shouted, turning towards the screen. “Hello? Ava, hello!”
He was sitting in the dark. Not the low illumination ambience he was used to, but dark. Every light in the room was out, all screens dead, overheads down, his headset utterly silent. He felt frustrated rage building up in him.
“Goddamn,” he swore.
He began breathing faster as he thought about that crying girl out there, alone. Unbidden, tears of impotence burned the backs of his eyes. He scowled, almost snarled, and pushed everything back. Why hasn’t the auxiliary power kicked on? he suddenly wondered.
“Why hasn’t the auxiliary power kicked on?” he bellowed.
He heard the two other 911 operators who were sitting beside him and still on shift also cursing. No one answered his question. In front of him, set off to the side since it was never used, the back-up ham radios kicked on. They were old redundancy systems, designed for use during cell tower incapacitation by inclement weather. With them suddenly being used... well, if he’d needed more proof that the shit had surely hit the fan, this by God was it.
“Able Seven,” a patrolman Parker knew as Mark Denham said into his radio. “Be advised, Dispatch, we have complete power outages in my vicinity. Stoplights went out—I need Fire and Rescue to Harp and Neilson Avenues. Multiple MVAs; multiple vehicles versus pedestrian!”
Parker knew Denham. He was a twelve-year veteran, calm and collected under pressure. He sounded more than excited, more than under pressure. He sounded shook up. One of the other operators took the call and began trying to roll Fire and Rescue.
“We’ve got a, wait… Jesus Christ!” another officer broke in. “We’ve got a plane down on Baker and Freemont! It slid into a row of houses! Everything’s burning!” The line clicked off, and for a moment there was silence. Then the officer clicked over again, his voice hard and flat. “Dispatch,” he said. “We need everyone. I’ve got six large residences fully engulfed. There are people trapped; I can hear them screaming from here.”
Like a dam breaking, more calls began coming in. Just like that, in a handful of seconds, the system overloaded and Parker realized that the city was done. Traffic lights being out were one thing, but a plane down? That meant only one thing: an EMP detonation. It was no longer about his little local 911 sub-station in a middle-sized suburb north of Louisville; this situation was going to be managed at State level now, or not at all. At least until FEMA rolled in.
There were not enough available officers to handle this kind of volume. The ones off duty were most likely busy scrambling to protect their families. When the officers came in, if they came in (because if this was Katrina level bad, they might not, he realized), it’d be to find themselves under a unified emergency command system.
And one girl, lost and crying on the phone with no GPS lock, was not going to get help. In the big picture, she wasn’t even going to matter. He’d failed her. Just like he’d failed Sara. That rage—that old red rage that burned hot, the one he’d tried to kill with Ativan and Zoloft and Pendleton drunk neat—stirred up in him, and he was galvanized.
“Think, goddamnit, think,” he told himself.
His eyes rapidly adjusted to the dark; probably because his pupils were already blown up big from the opiates, he thought with a touch of self-recrimination. He had no way to find her. Ava, he told himself. Her name is Ava, she’s not a problem, she’s a girl, and she needs me.
What did he know? What had he learned during that call?
She was a Hoosier, born and bred by that accent. He knew her area code, though that was a pretty open-ended clue. But what he really knew, the thing that shook him in his belly, was that he knew the Stapleton Mall area very well. Sara had been involved there, and emergency or not, this was the closest thing to a clue about her disappearing he’d had in a long while.
Grab your copy of Dead Lines here.