Silent Interruption

by Trent Russell

  Well, screw that. Carl wasn’t here to make partisan statements or joust with someone like the talking heads on television did. He wanted to deliver an important message, and he refused to trivialize it.

  “No thanks. Debating’s not my thing,” Carl said.

  Preston nodded. “No problem. It’s not for everyone. I understand.”

  Carl instead tried jumping to a different subject, something other than politics. He realized he had discussed little else with Preston in the few times they had chatted. Since Carl intended to speak with the Rally for Rights for a while, he figured warming up his relationship with Preston was a good start. “So, how’s family doing?”

  Preston’s smug demeanor evaporated a little, as if Carl had butted into a subject that Preston didn’t care about talking about. “What do you mean?”

  “Just curious. You never talk about them a lot except to tell me they’re bankrolling your trip across the country.”

  “Well, they’re very loving parents, Carl. They take good care of their son, good care.” Preston smiled the angriest smile Carl ever had seen on a person. “I think that’s all I need to say.”

  “Alright.” Carl mustered a polite smile. “They just sound like interesting people. Nothing like my parents.”

  “Well, I’m sure your parents are fine, fine people. But really, I don’t care to talk about them or anyone else. The star of the show has taken his bow, and now he wants to sit down and enjoy some coffee.” The smugness resurfaced in Preston’s face. “But I’m sure you’ll do the best you can. Nobody could ask for more.”

  Preston then started off for the curb of Westlake Boulevard. The street ran between the park and Michelle’s Coffee. “So, you’re not going to stick around?” Carl asked.

  “Me? Naah.” Preston turned around and winked before turning and running toward the crosswalk that bridged the park and Michelle’s.

  Carl bit his upper lip. Well, that had gone as well as he had expected. As usual, Preston cared little about anything other than his righteous crusade. Carl wondered if Preston ever had worked a job for himself in his life, or if he always siphoned off his parents. He once overheard Preston mentioning that a shirt he wore cost two hundred dollars. Two hundred! Carl couldn’t imagine buying a shirt for more than twenty at Walmart.

  “Well, that’s one hard act to follow, isn’t it?” Janet asked at the podium. A large portion of the crowd cheered in agreement.

  “Preston’s one hell of a superstar, right?” The crowd cheered even louder.

  Carl gritted his teeth. He hated that Janet was giving Preston that kind of open support. He wanted these rallies to offer more diverse viewpoints. Also, Janet seemed to be setting up Carl for a fall. Carl understood that the backers behind some of these rallies didn’t care for ex-military to show up unless they delivered the kind of scorching rhetoric they wanted.

  “Our next speaker is a newcomer to the Rally for Rights. He’s a former Marine,” Janet said. Someone in the crowd booed. Janet just laughed softly and continued, while Carl’s stomach churned some more.

  “He’s been around the world and is somebody who is ready to tell you how to change the paradigm of corporate hypnosis in our nation.” Janet glanced in Carl’s direction. “In just a few minutes, we’ll bring out Sergeant Carl Mathers.”

  The crowd cheered. It was polite, even strong, though it did not equal the raging bombast that had followed Preston’s speech.

  I’m a lamb being led to the slaughter. Carl clutched his stomach. Maybe he was sick enough not to speak.

  No, he wouldn’t give in to cheap excuses. He turned to the small bathroom door on the edge of the stage. However, he could use some time in the bathroom to gather his wits…and take one hell of a piss.

  Chapter Four

  The crowd started clapping and cheering as Carl approached the microphone. The cheering, oddly enough, filled him with growing confidence. Perhaps the rapture of a crowd’s cheer was doing the trick, or the fact that with so much cheering and shouting, Carl couldn’t see their faces so clearly. Their eyes were not bearing down on him as before.

  Carl even chuckled a little when he realized these people probably had no idea who he was. Carl Mathers was a nobody. He wasn’t a famous author, or a cable news show host, or a popular actor. Who would be so excited to hear what he had to say?

  The amusement of the moment helped him take the crucial final steps to the mic. “Thank you,” he said softly, and with a slight croak. He cleared his throat, then said louder, “Thank you!”

  He repeated it several times. The crowd took it as a sign to quiet down. Carl was pleased at how simple that was. Now he actually had to give his speech.

  “Thank you for that great and wonderful reception. I hope you feel the same way when I’m finished.” Carl chuckled, which quickly gave way to a cough. “Excuse me. Thank you again for the great turnout. My name is Carl Mathers. I served nine years in the U.S. Armed Forces. It’s been an honor to serve my country.”

  “Since I returned home, I’ve been growing very worried about where our country is going. Actually, where the whole world is going.” A few people clapped and cheered, but Carl quickly pushed on, quieting them down.

  “My tours of duty have taken me to places on this planet that face some of the worst challenges in infrastructure and stability. It is clear to me that our world’s state is fragile and unstable. You see it all over the news. The oil and gas industry in Russia is facing a massive crisis, and the people there are demanding change, but their leadership keeps tightening the screws. China’s economic engine has stalled so badly it’s possible the army may be mobilized to flood into the countryside if the people revolt because they can’t get work. And all across Europe, the currency crisis is threatening to turn money that’s resting in people’s banks so worthless that it won’t pay for food, electricity and basic health care.”

  Suddenly, a bearded man in a cloth cap raised a fist and yelled, “Screw paper currency! Go to bitcoins!” A few spectators called out words of agreement and hollered.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Carl nodded.

  “Some people say alternative currencies are the answer. But I believe we have a deeper problem that we need to solve before it’s too late. Our infrastructure s on the verge of failing. And it’s failing because we’ve drained our resources and broken the bonds that we as people used to share. Hundreds of years ago, rulers would go to war to take land and resources to build up their countries. Some say that can’t happen today. We don’t go to war to conquer people. I don’t believe that. There’s too many ticking time bombs around the world. Someone, somewhere is going to think he doesn’t have anything to lose by launching a nuclear missile if he can get some land or maybe a few islands.”

  Another young man, much closer to the stage, cupped his hands and screamed, “Burn the military-industrial complex down! Stop the warmongers! Stop the profiteers!” That shout roused almost half the crowd.

  Carl’s skin burned. He was not here to condemn institutions so strongly. He wanted to inspire the crowd, not set them in a bloodlust.

  “Many of you have very strong opinions about what our government is doing. I get that. I have strong opinions, too. But I’m not here to tell you what they should be doing. I want to tell you what we can do. We can’t depend on the good wisdom of the people who run our institutions. We need to start relying on ourselves.

  “Think about when hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast. You see on television wrecked houses as far as the eye can see. Those people don’t have electricity. They can’t go to the store to pick up food and water. If they haven’t prepared, if they didn’t stock up on bottled water and preserved food, they have to hope that help comes. But what if help doesn’t come?”

  The crowd grew quiet. Carl’s words weren’t inspiring hoots and hollers. Perhaps they were taking his message seriously. Carl’s confidence grew. He must be making the impact he wished.

  “I want you all to know that you don’t have to be victims. Y
ou’re not sheep. I see the future here, the future of our country—”

  “We are victims!” screamed a bespectacled young woman. “Victims of the global power structure!”

  “They’re stealing our future! Stealing our wealth!” said a young man in a long brown coat beside her.

  One of the men close by, however, did not share their views. “Hey, shut up! I want to hear this guy!” he screamed.

  Carl clutched the podium. What would he do if this crowd grew unruly? Yet, he had to press on.

  Preston pushed open the door to Michelle’s. The room was a sea of adults and teens, all seated at tables drinking coffee and eating sandwiches, salads or soups. Many of them wore earbuds, which were connected to either their phones or their laptops.

  Usually, Preston would plug into his own phone and quickly check through news updates, but with his neck bothering him, he’d rather watch the flat screen monitor hanging from the ceiling. He also was tempted to turn on the streaming broadcast from the Rally for Rights, to see how Carl was faring, but he knew it would be replayed once the full stream was recorded.

  The man’s out of his league, Preston thought with a smile. Carl probably was allowed up there as a kind of rebuttal. After all, Carl was a right-winger. With all of Carl’s talk about self-reliance, Preston was sure of it. Janet and the rest of the support staff just needed some window dressing to make the Rally for Rights seem bipartisan. But Preston knew the heart of the movement belonged to him and his views.

  Preston sat at the counter and said to the waitress behind it, “I’d like an iced coffee with milk.” The waitress complied.

  Preston then turned his head to the left. The monitor was set to a cable news network, which wasn’t unusual for this establishment. However, the female news anchor on-screen looked a little agitated. News professionals were usually unflappable unless they were on a discussion panel. Footage of cloudy skies over a green landscape with mountains in the background, possibly somewhere in the United States, played in the right-hand corner of the screen.

  “Sir?” the waitress asked. “That will be five twenty.”

  Preston didn’t hear it. The anchor was speaking. “Yes, can you repeat that?” No one on-screen spoke. Perhaps she was being fed the information over an earpiece.

  “Yes, we can confirm a second massive explosion over the Rocky Mountains. We don’t know the cause yet. Are we going to Ben in Denver yet?” The anchor braced the right side of her head, then tapped it. “No, we have lost contact?”

  What the hell is going on? It sounds almost like an alien invasion, Preston thought.

  “Sir?” the waitress repeated.

  “What?” Preston looked at his cup.

  “Oh, sorry.” He reached back into his wallet and fished out his credit card. Then he slipped the card into the reader and waited for the machine to approve his payment.

  Looking slightly to her right, the female anchor’s eyes widened. “Are we confirming that? Are we confirming that?” Then she turned back to the camera. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are getting reports from the White House that they have confirmed atmospheric explosions that are probably the cause of—”

  And then the screen went blank.

  “What the hell?” Preston then glanced at the lights over the bar. They had gone out. Behind Preston, the patrons were unplugging their buds and looking closely at their monitors and phone screens. All of them had gone black.

  Preston then glanced at his credit card. It hung out of the card reader, which now was blank. The screen was dark. He wondered if the machine even had been able to charge his card. The waitress tending to him was talking with one of her fellow servers.

  He pulled out his card, then took out his phone. It suddenly had gone dead, just like all the others. Wait, why the hell is my phone out? Smart phones work off batteries if they’re not plugged in.

  Preston pushed himself off the stool. Nearby, a waitress was listening in on a landline hoping to hear a dial tone. Finally, she shook her head and put the receiver back on the wall.

  Some of the customers folded up their electronics and then headed out to their vehicles. Preston watched a few of them pull out their car keys and press the unlock button on the keychain. But as they reached their cars and pulled on the car handles, they suddenly found the vehicles remained locked. Frustrated, the patrons simply unlocked the cars with their keys. But once they got in, none of the vehicles started up.

  This is crazy. Preston rushed out the front door, finding a surreal scene.

  The parking lot was utterly, completely still. Cars that had been driving through the lot suddenly were suddenly stopped. One car had glided into a light post. Several hoods were popped up, with stranded motorists looking inside to try figuring out how to start their vehicles. One young man kept trying to dial his smart phone in vain, and finally threw his useless device off into the nearby bushes.

  “Okay, I have got to be dreaming this,” Preston whispered. What kind of a blackout stops electronics with their own batteries and every car or truck in sight?

  Carl gripped the podium a little tighter. His rapport with the audience had collapsed, at least with those who wanted more red meat skewering the corporate and military interests across the globe. Still, the anger being vented at him by hecklers only fueled his desire to continue. The fact that some in the crowd shouted in support of Carl added to his determination.

  “What I’m saying isn’t exactly popular,” he said into the microphone. “It doesn’t sound like the red meat we’re so used to today, but I’d rather speak the truth then remain silent. I know what’s coming. I know our nation, no, our world is in for a great trial. As Benjamin Franklin told the signers of the Constitution, ‘We must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately.’”

  Whatever Carl said afterward went unheard by almost everyone out there, for the microphone chose that moment to go dead. Carl tapped the mic’s head. Nothing, no feedback, no loud taps through the speakers.

  Damn. They must have cut me off, he thought. He was a bit surprised they hadn’t tried this earlier when the crowd grew agitated.

  His arms shook. Without his ability to respond to the hecklers, the nerves returned to vex him again. Perhaps he should cut his losses and get the hell off this stage.

  His internal struggle was momentarily silenced when he realized the hecklers all had fallen silent.

  The crowd was not cheering or jeering. Instead many of them were looking down at their phones. It was an ocean of black screens. The spectators reacted with utter confusion. They tapped their phones, turned them upside down, took out their batteries and put them back in, all to no avail.

  Then Carl heard chatter behind him. The event managers were testing speaker wires or looking at laptops that had gone blank. One of them turned to Carl and said, “Everything’s dead. We can’t get any sound or anything. Nothing works.”

  “Nothing.”

  Carl was about to walk away from the podium and join them when distant shouts drew his attention back to the crowd. A few spectators on the outlying part of the crowd were running away from a car that suddenly was careening off the nearby road. The car acted totally out of control. Carl couldn’t see the driver inside. Was he or she drunk, or had the vehicle malfunctioned?

  The land just off the road sloped upward, so the car’s velocity was quickly cut down. It rolled forward much more slowly, bouncing with the uneven land, until it came to a halt just short of the crowd’s perimeter.

  Carl couldn’t contemplate what had caused such an accident. The scene on the road was offering one horror after another. Every vehicle in sight was inexplicably slowing down. One rear-ended another, sending it sliding off the asphalt and into the median on the other side. Then, a large semi-truck barreled down the road, its mass too great to allow it to slow down easily. It smashed against a car’s rear that was sticking out into the road, sending it spinning completely off into the grass. Carl winced when he thought of the people still in that vehicle.<
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  As for the semi, it was not slowed nearly enough to bring it to a stop. Carl rushed to the edge of the stage where he could see the road farther away. The boulevard curved sharply to the left. The truck was barreling toward the turn. Would the driver turn the wheel in time?

  The wheels started to turn, but the truck did not slow down. It was speeding toward the turn too quickly. Carl’s worst fears came true when the truck did not steer with the road in time and instead sped off the boulevard and smacked right into the front windows of a nearby convenience store. The truck plowed inside the small shop, driving in deeper and deeper. Carl’s stomach churned as he imagined the fate of the people inside the store who had no inkling of what was about to come crashing their way.

  At last, the truck’s rampage finally ceased. The vehicle lay protruding from the store. Carl looked around as far as he could in the surrounding area. Automobiles either had stopped cold on the roads or sped off and slammed into buildings or canals. But worst of all, Carl could not hear any police or ambulance sirens. Nobody was coming to tend to the disaster.

  “My God,” Carl said. This was not a power outage. No electricity blackout could pull the plug on every mobile device and every vehicle.

  “Carl!” Janet rushed up to him. The once unflappable rally manager looked frightened beyond words.

  “Carl! What the hell is going on here? This…” She pointed to the roads. “Just what is all this? You’re a military man. You’ve got to know something about this.”

  Carl swallowed. Below, the crowd was growing more agitated. About half of them were fleeing to their cars, but Carl knew they soon would find they weren’t going anywhere in those vehicles.

  “Yeah,” Carl said, “I think I know what’s going on here.” He looked up at the cloudy sky. “Get out of here. Run home, get food and water. And a gun.” Carl then turned back to Janet. “Anything that’s going to save your life.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Janet was shaking. “Okay, this is just a natural disaster, right? It’s going to pass. We’ll just hunker down. The police are going to be on their way.” Then she started laughing. “Yeah, yeah they’re on their way.”