Officer Of The Watch: Blackout Volume 1

by D W McAliley

Eric shook his head and pulled Christina close, burying her face in his shoulder. He watched numbly as the pre-dawn light silhouetted a huge shape as it plummeted towards the ground. A few seconds later, a new fireball rose into the sky.

  “No,” he whispered softly, “they’re airplanes.”

  Ch. 4

  The Morning Brief

  Captain Joe Tillman stood at one end of the seven foot long conference table. At the other end of the room was a one hundred and twenty inch panel screen divided into six sections. In each section was the image of a high ranking official or a top military officer. Behind Joe, the entire wall served as large projector screen which currently showed the recorded satellite feed of New York Harbor as the missile streaked up from the harbor and the nuclear weapon that detonated at ground level.

  Once the video played twice, Joe clicked the projector and the image shifted to a slide with bullet points outlining the known information. Unfortunately, there were more questions than facts.

  "We know that four weapons were detonated at exactly 200km altitude," Joe continued. "We know the high-altitude EMP bursts have caused significant damage to electronics and to the power grid. Our systems were protected because we use all optical transmission lines with hardened electronics on the repeater stations. We're not sure at this time what the long term impact will be, and we can reasonably expect failures on the diesel backup generators from faults introduced in the wire windings. As it stands, we have limited power available at critical points, but communications have been slow and intermittent with domestic and international bases."

  "What kind of exposure are we looking at overseas?" Admiral Fitzsimmons, the Chief of Naval Operations asked as the blood drained from his face.

  "As I said, Admiral, our communications overseas have been intermittent at best," Joe replied. "No current reports of attacks as of yet. All staff members have been placed on the highest alert readiness status. Per our established disaster protocol, there should be active combat air patrols over all foreign bases at this point."

  "Who hit us, and how did they get in without our knowledge?" Defense Secretary Davisson asked.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Secretary, but we just don't know yet," Joe admitted. "There are several front runners, but we'll need spectral analysis of the radioactive material to determine where the bombs were manufactured, and the only place we know that is available is GZ1."

  "You mean New York," Secretary Davisson interrupted, his voice hard and cold.

  "Yes, Mr. Secretary," Joe continued without breaking stride, "and as of yet, we don't have the means to coordinate that kind of search and recovery effort."

  General Alexander, Army Chief of Staff, cleared his throat and asked, "Is this thing over yet, or are we expecting another hit?"

  Joe shook his head. "General, I don't know how to answer that. We haven't been able to re-establish communications with half of our bases here in the U.S. NORAD's comm. link is flashing in and out, and we have intermittent radar coverage at best. Most of the info we're getting is from our secure satellite links. From those images, it looks like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami were all three hit with ground level nukes. There are clear indications of widespread fires over most of the area our geo-synch satellites cover. Beyond that, we just don't know. We're gathering data currently and as soon as we have more information we'll deliver it. That process is slow given the current state of the power grid and the lack of any reliable communications."

  Secretary Davisson sighed heavily. "So basically, what you're telling us is that we don't know how bad it really is, we don't know who hit us, and we don't even know if it's really over yet? What do you suggest we tell the President, Captain?"

  "Pray," Joe said when nothing else would come to him.

  "Thank you, Captain Tillman," Secretary Davisson said in a strained voice. "Keep at things on your end, and we'll continue working at it from ours. I want another brief in 2 hours, and keep us updated as new information becomes available. Our first priority has to be establishing communications outside the secure optic network. Get on it, Captain. Dismissed."

  One by one, the panels on the screen went dark.

  Ch. 5

  Morning After

  Eric rolled Christina’s sleeping bag up and tied it as tightly as he could then set it off to the side. As gently as he could, he moved Christina off his sleeping bag and onto a nearby boulder. Christina moved woodenly, staring off into space without really acknowledging his presence. Tears streamed silently down her cheeks. Eric rolled up the remaining sleeping bag and then tied both of them to the frame of his hiking pack. After doing a quick sweep of the area to make sure they hadn’t left anything behind, Eric shouldered his pack and grabbed their hiking sticks.

  Eric knelt in front of Christina and handed her stick to her, patting her knee, and said, “Tina, the sun is coming up and we need to go. We’ve got to get down off the mountain and get back to camp, okay?”

  A brief look of confusion passed across Christina’s face, and then her eyes seemed to focus on Eric for the first time as she blinked.

  “But what about the people?” Christina asked in a whisper.

  “What people, Tina?” Eric asked, confused.

  “The people,” Christina repeated with heat in her voice. “The people on the planes! The planes crashed, but they had people on them. What about the people?”

  Eric took a deep, slow breath through his nose and had to swallow past a hard lump his throat to answer. “I don’t know, Tina. But we can’t worry about that right now. We have to focus on getting down off this mountain, okay? I’ll help you the whole way, but we have to go. One step at a time, and we’ll get it done. Once we’re back in camp, then we can worry about other stuff.”

  Christina nodded slowly, and Eric helped her to her feet. Carefully, the two made their way down the winding trail and off Crowder’s Mountain. The ‘mountain’ was barely worth the name at hardly more than 1600 feet elevation. Still, compared to the surrounding flood plains, it was a towering giant. The trail wasn’t difficult, but it was deep in shadows for the most part, and there were stones and roots exposed enough to trip over if you weren’t cautious. Christina stumbled several times, but Eric managed to catch her before she hit the ground.

  It was a little more than a mile down Pinnacle Trail from the peak to where the side trail that led to their campground split off from the main path. After nearly an hour of hiking, the sun was well up, and Eric and Christina were both soaked with sweat. As they approached the sign marking the camp trail, a uniformed park ranger stepped out of the brush with his gun drawn.

  “DOWN!” The ranger yelled, pointing with his free hand at the ground, “DOWN! On your knees, hands where I can see them!”

  Eric froze and Christina screamed collapsed in a sobbing heap. The ranger blinked, not quite sure what to do. Thankfully, a second ranger came running up the trail from the direction of the park office. She looked a bit older and had several stripes of rank on her uniform.

  “Jesus, Mike,” the woman said. “Put your damned gun away! Can’t you see these people are terrified?”

  Mike hesitated for a moment, then holstered his pistol as the woman walked the rest of the way to them.

  “Look, Claire,” Mike said, “they were on the trails after hours, and we don’t know who they are.”

  “Did you ask?” Claire demanded with her fists on her hips. Mike didn’t say anything, and Claire shook her head. “I didn’t think so. You folks camping up here?”

  Eric nodded and pointed towards the campgrounds. “Our stuff is back in the camp area. We just went up last night to watch the meteors.”

  Claire nodded and knelt in front of the still sobbing Christine. She took Christine’s hands in her own and squeezed them reassuringly. “It’s okay, honey,” the matronly ranger said in a soothing voice. “Mike’s just scared and nervous. I guess we all are. You are safe, okay? No need to cry now, honey. What’s your name?”

  Christina tried to answer, but
she was crying too hard to get words out, so Eric said, “I’m Eric, and that’s Christina, my fiancée.”

  Claire put her arms around Christina and held her as the younger woman shook and cried. Mike mumbled something under his breath, then turned and walked back down the trail towards the park office. Eric wasn’t quite sure what to do, so he stood and waited in the uncomfortable silence. After a few long minutes, Christina finally cried herself out and wiped her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. Sobs still shook her shoulders, but she had settled down enough for Claire to help her to her feet.

  “Eric, you take Christina here back to camp,” Claire said, patting Christina on the back reassuringly. “Get her some good cool water from the pump, and you two get some rest.”

  Claire started to turn away, but Eric reached out, caught her sleeve, and stopped her. “Do you know what’s going on?” he asked. “We saw… Well, we saw a lot of things. Have you heard anything at all? Any news?”

  Claire patted Eric’s hand as she gently unclenched his fingers. “We’re trying to find out as much as we can. As soon as we hear something, we’ll let you know. For right now, though, we’re asking everyone to stay close to their campsite so we know where everyone is for safety reasons. Y’all just concentrate on getting something to eat, staying hydrated, and getting some rest. We’ll take care of everything else, okay?”

  Eric nodded and half carried Christina as they walked down the short trail to the campgrounds. Each camp site was sectioned off from the others with a thick hedge-row. The individual sites had their own electrical outlets under a small lean-to style picnic shelter. A circle of large, rounded river stones marked the campfire area, and each site had a hand-operated pump that gave fresh, cold water from the naturally filtered subterranean springs in the area.

  Inside their medium-sized six person dome tent, Eric spread out a foam pad and then opened Christina’s sleeping bag and lay over top of it. He helped Christian onto the pallet and then stepped back outside. A wave of exhaustion rolled him, but Eric shook it off and went to refill all of their water bottles from the hand pump. He set the full water bottles and coolers under the picnic shelter out of the sun.

  With the water supply replenished, Eric carefully and quietly stuck his head in the tent and retrieved his phone charger, Christina’s cell phone, and the small weather alert radio he always carried when camping. He first tried to power on his phone again but couldn’t get any life out of it even after plugging it into his charger and plugging the charger into the outlet under the picnic shelter. Christina’s phone also had a shattered touch screen and wouldn’t respond to any of the buttons he could press. Discouraged, Eric tried to power up the small alert radio with similar results.

  Drained, Eric folded his arms on the picnic table and leaned forward to rest his head on them. He closed his eyes briefly and tried not to relive the last moments of the night before as he and Christina had watched airplane after airplane crash to the ground. He wondered how many people had been on board those flights. He’d stopped counting after fifteen explosions, but there had been many more. At least a couple of thousand passengers, probably more, had perished in front of them in the space of a few minutes.

  Eric shuddered hard, and the tears he’d been holding back by sheer force of will finally broke through, and he wept.

  Ch. 6

  The Kindness Of….

  Eric woke with a start and winced as the muscles in his neck cried out in protest. He blinked and rubbed the sleep from his eyes as he looked around, trying to get his bearings. His eyes fell on the line of water jugs underneath the table, and the reality of the night before crashed down on him. Eric sighed heavily and pulled himself to his feet. He made a quick round of the camp and collected everything together under the picnic shelter. He began packing the coolers and getting things ready to haul back down the trail to the parking lot. Once Christina woke up, he wanted to be ready to hit the road.

  When everything was packed for travel, Eric took all of the disposables and the trash he'd collected and tossed it in the two large round metal trash cans by the trail. He looked at the shortened shadows around the trees and the shelter and guessed it was probably close to noon. The sun overhead was beating down, and his shirt was soaked with sweat.

  There was no sound or movement from the tent, so Eric stuck his head in the door to check on Christina. As soon as his head hit the inside of the tent he caught the sharp, acrid stench of vomit. Christina lay on her side, and there was a stain on the floor of the tent where she'd gotten sick. She was breathing in rapid, shallow gasps. Eric put his hand to her forehead to check for a fever, but her skin was slick with sweat and cold to the touch. Her cheeks were pale, and her lips had a light bluish tint to them. He nudged her, gently at first and then with more force, but Christina didn't budge.

  Suddenly, Eric's pulse was pounding in his ears, and he felt tears well up in his eyes. He clenched his fists and bolted from the tent.

  "HELP!" he yelled as loudly as he could. He ran to the picnic shelter and grabbed two of the pans they'd used to cook dinner the night before and he began banging them together, yelling at the top of his lungs, "HELP!"

  After a few minutes, a barrel-chested man with a vast paunch hanging over his faded denim jeans and straining the buttons on his bright red shirt came shuffling down the path from one of the other campsites. His head was completely bald on top, but a fringe of long silver hair around the sides was pulled back in a ponytail and a broad gray and white beard fanned out over his massive chest. Leather suspenders helped his wide leather belt hold his pants up, and he wore cowboy boots that matched his belt.

  The man was out of breath, and his face was almost as red as his shirt when he made it to Eric.

  "What's the problem, son?" the man asked in a winded Texas drawl.

  "I don't know," Eric said as he dropped the pans. "My fiancé is in the tent, and she's sick or something. I can't get her to wake up!"

  The man placed a large, heavy hand on Eric's shoulder. "It's okay, son. Let me take a look, alright? You show me where she is."

  Eric nodded and led the man over to the tent. There wasn't room for both of them plus Christina, so Eric held the tent flap as the man worked his way half inside the tent to check on her. After a few moments, the man grunted and grumbled as he struggled back out of the tent and into a kneeling crouch just outside the door.

  "Looks like she's in shock, son," the man said. "We need to get her feet up and get her warm. Listen, back up the trail is Site 3C. My wife is there, and her name is Imogene. You tell her Bill needs her help and bring her back, okay? Then you run back down the trail and get one of the rangers."

  Eric shook his head and grated through clenched teeth, "I'm staying with her."

  Bill reached up and put his hand on Eric's shoulder again. "I understand, son, but I need help here. Now, you look at me. Which one of us can go, get help, and get back quicker? I know you're worried and you're scared, but right now I need you to trust me."

  After a brief hesitation, Eric nodded. He turned and sprinted up the trail, looking for site 3C. After a few hundred yards, he found the sign and ran up to the very petite woman stringing up linens on a clothes line between two trees. She had curly hair that was brushed and teased into a perfect cap of steel-gray ringlets. As Eric came to a skidding halt, she turned and smiled at him, wiping her hands on an apron that hung down the front of her pale green cotton dress.

  "So you were the one makin’ all that racket?" Imogene asked in a sweet voice.

  Eric nodded out of breath, as he panted, "Bill needs help. My fiancé. Site 3A down the trail. On left. I have to get rangers."

  Imogene nodded. "I'll get what I can and take it to him. You run on now, dear."

  Eric nodded again and bolted back down the path. The trees passed by in a blur as he ran. Twice he tripped and slid on the loose gravel, but he jumped back to his feet and continued down the path. Finally, out of breath and bleeding from a few cuts on his hands, Eric
leapt up the three wooden steps to the front porch of the ranger's office. He started pounding on the door, hard, and didn't let up until the knob turned and a disgruntled Mike opened it.

  "Jesus, don't beat the thing down," Mike growled. "Oh, you. What do you want?"

  Eric was breathing hard but managed to say, "Christina's sick, in shock maybe. There's a guy helping, but we need you. She won't wake up."

  Instantly, Mike's facial expression changed. He nodded once and opened the door wide enough for Eric to enter. Mike went to one wall and grabbed a red and black medical bag that he slung over his shoulder.

  "Site 3A, right?" he asked, already moving towards the door. "Okay, let's go."

  Mike led the way out the door and shut it behind Eric. He locked the deadbolt and followed Eric up the trail. The ranger moved surprisingly quickly up the trail and soon passed Eric and kept running. When Eric reached the campsite, he was panting and soaking wet with sweat. His side had started to cramp, and he bent over trying to catch his breath.

  Mike jogged up to the tent and got a brief rundown from Bill and Imogene. He stepped into the tent and got a look at Christina, who was still lying on her side, panting and sweating. Eric watched through the back window as Mike took Christina's pulse and listened to her heartbeat and respiration with a stethoscope he pulled from the kit. Mike carefully lifted her eyelids and checked her pupils with a flashlight.

  Finally, Mike backed out of the tent and turned to Eric. "She's dehydrated and in shock. We need to get fluids in her to get her electrolytes balanced and her blood pressure stabilized. That means an IV, okay?"

  Eric nodded, "Whatever you have to do."

  Mike nodded and ducked back into the tent. Imogene came over and patted Eric on the back, gently leading him away from the tent with Bill.

  "Bill," Imogene said, "you take this young man over to that shelter and get some water in him before he dries up like a raisin, okay?"