Without warning

by John Birmingham

  As soon as she voiced the thought in her mind, her heart lurched forward. Disappeared.

  No, he wasn’t gone too. He was fine. He’d left a hiking plan with her and the park rangers, and as soon as she’d called them they said there was no way he would have been anywhere near the edge of this… effect… event… whatever it was. It was on the far side of the mountains.

  She began shaking anyway, an uncontrolled shudder that seized her whole body as dizziness threatened to steal her legs from under her. Biting down on a knuckle until she drew blood helped to focus her mind away from the terror that wanted to swamp her. The pain was something sharp and real, something on which to focus. And as soon as she did, Barb was embarrassed that she’d let herself get so frantic. She gathered up the broken pieces of her cell phone and tossed them into the front passenger seat before moving around to the driver’s door. She was going to hit the shopping trolley if she backed out, but really didn’t care. Getting Suzie away from here was more important.

  ‘Is Daddy all right, Mommy? Is he okay?’ she asked as soon as Barb had the door closed. It shut out some of the chaos and madness but meant that Suzie could see without any distractions just how disturbed her mother was.

  ‘He’s fine, sweetheart,’ she said, as calmly as she could manage. ‘His friends from work are phoning him and sending a helicopter just for him. To bring him home. He’ll be back later, don’t worry.’

  ‘But what if he got eaten, Mommy. I heard a man in the store say everyone was eaten. Everyone.’

  ‘Daddy is fine,’ she repeated calmly, even as her head reeled with the insanity of it all. ‘And nobody was eaten, Suzie. I don’t know what’s happened, but nobody was eaten. That’s just silly talk. Now strap yourself in, sweetie. This is going to be very dangerous.’

  The young girl snapped her seatbelt to show that she’d already done so, and Barb apologised for not noticing. She keyed the ignition (which worked perfectly, like those of all the other cars in the parking lot) and slowly but resolutely backed out of her parking space, pushing the trolley aside with the rear bumper. A few more scrapes and scratches, then.

  The view out of the back window was bedlam, with people swarming and vehicles everywhere. Barb gritted her teeth and kept moving, even as she butted up against shoppers who didn’t move out of her way. Some hammered on the window – one guy punching it so hard it cracked, causing Suzie to squeal in fear. But Barbara Kipper refused to stop, believing that to do so would see them trapped. She was only making a walking pace, but kept going. Not for the first time was she grateful to be driving a small car in this parking lot. Whereas SUVs and sedans soon got themselves jammed together, almost like broken teeth on a zipper, she was able to thread, very slowly and determinedly, through the crowd, until she made it to a small hedge line at the edge of the lot and gunned the little Honda right on through it. The car didn’t like it much, and the scratching of branches on the paintwork was hideous. She almost certainly knocked the wheels out of alignment while mounting the kerb, but she was suddenly able to press the accelerator and break free onto Harvard Avenue. They bounced and hit the road with a terrible, metallic crunch. But at least they were out.

  As they drove away in the heavy traffic, Barb was certain she heard the pop of gunfire. She couldn’t help but keep looking at the phone, wondering if Barney had got through to Kip.

  * * * *

  3

  GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, CUBA

  Somebody must have tipped off the ragheads, because they were wailing up a storm. Long ululating cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ rolled around the dusty confines of Camp X-ray, drifting over the razor wire. General Musso heard them as tinny voices emanating from the speakers of a nearby computer in the situation room of the Naval Op Centre, at the southern end of the base. ‘Operation centre’ was a grand title for such a modest facility, a demountable hut with heavy grey air-con units rumbling away at the windows. It was a relatively mild Caribbean day outside. Late winter in Cuba was almost but not quite balmy. The brigadier general knew he could probably run up and down the nearest of the scrubby, low-rise hills that surrounded this part of the base without raising much of a sweat. But the room was stuffy. Dozens of laptops had been plugged into the existing cluster of workstations and they were all running hard, dumping waste heat into a space that was already overcrowded, with at least three times as many occupants as normal.

  Having given up on the computers in frustration, Tusk Musso leaned over the old map table, gripping the back of a swivel chair, biting down hard on the urge to pick it up and throw it through the window. He was so angry – and, just quietly, so weirded out-that there was a fair chance he could have heaved that sucker all the way down to the water’s edge. The bay was deep cerulean blue, almost perfectly still, and the chair would have made a satisfying splash. Unfortunately, Musso was the ranking officer on the base today and everybody was looking to him for answers. Guantanamo’s naval commandant, Captain Cimines, was missing, apparently along with about three hundred million of his countrymen, and a whole heap of Mexicans and Canucks into the bargain. And Cubans too, Musso reminded himself. Let’s not forget our old buds just over the wire.

  ‘What are the locals up to, Georgie?’ he rumbled.

  His aide, Lieutenant Colonel George Stavros, delivered one brief shake of the head. ‘Still hopping around, sir. Looks like someone really kicked over their anthill. Our guys have counted at least two hundred of them bugging out.’

  ‘But nothing coming our way yet?’

  ‘No sir. Santiago and Baracoa are still quiet. A few crowds building, but nothing too big.’

  Musso nodded slowly. He was a huge man, with what looked like a solid block of white granite for a head, resting atop a tree trunk of a neck. Even that one simple gesture spoke of enormous reserves of power. He shifted his gaze from the antique, analogue reality of the map table with its little wooden and plastic markers, across to the banks of flat screens, which even now were refusing to tell him anything about what was going on a short distance to the north. The faces of the men and women around him were a study in barely constrained anxiety. They were a mixed service group about two dozen strong, representing all the arms of the US military that had a stake in Guantanamo, mostly Navy and Marines, but with a few Army and Air Force types thrown in. There was even one lone Coast Guard rep, mournfully staring at the map table, wondering where his little boat could possibly have gone. The cutter had dropped out of contact. It was easily found on radar, but would not respond to hail.

  Musso had no permanent connection to Guantanamo. He’d been sent down to review operations at X-ray, the first task of a new job, a desk job back in DC he really hadn’t wanted. A genuine shooting war was about to begin, and here he was, on a fucking day trip to Gitmo, making sure a bunch of jihadi whackjobs were getting their asses wiped for them with silken handkerchiefs, not copies of the Koran. It was almost enough to test a man’s faith, and more than enough to make this one regret the international law degree he’d taken as a younger marine. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. A fall back, his old man had called it, in case he didn’t take to the Corps with any enthusiasm. Musso stood erect, folded his arms as though examining a really shitty used-car deal, and grunted.

  ‘Okay. Let’s take an inventory. What do we know for certain?’ he asked, and began ticking the answers off on his fingers. ‘Thirty-three minutes ago, we lost contact with CONUS for two minutes. We had nothing but static on the phones, sat links, the net, broadcast TV, radio – everything. Then, all of our comm links started functioning again, but we get no response to anything we send home. All our other links are fine – Pearl, NATO, ANZUS, CENTCOM in Qatar – but not Tampa. All responding and wanting to know what the hell is going on. But we have no fucking idea. I mean, look at that… What the hell is that about?’

  The Marine Corps lawyer was waving his hand at a bank of TV monitors. They were all tuned in to US news networks, which should have been pumping out their inane babble tw
enty-four,’ seven. With the war in Iraq only days away, the global audience for reports out of America and the Middle East was huge and nigh on insatiable. But there was the Atlanta studio of CNN, back after a few minutes of static, devoid of life. The anchor desk sat in centre frame, and dozens of TV and computer screens flickered away in the background, but nobody from CNN was anywhere to be seen. The same over at Fox. Bill O’Reilly’s chair was empty. Bloomberg still filled most of one monitor with garishly bright cascades of financial data, but the little picture window in one corner where you’d normally find a couple of dark-suited bizoids droning on about acquisitions and mergers was occupied by two chairs, what looked like some smouldering rags, and nothing else. Meanwhile another bank of screens, running satellite feeds from Europe and Asia, showed the studios there to be fully operational, and peopled by increasingly worried talking heads, none of whom could explain what was happening in North America.

  ‘Anybody?’ asked Musso, not really expecting an answer.

  The silence might have become unbearable had it not been broken by a young ensign, who coughed nervously at the edge of the huddle. ‘Excuse me, General,’ she said.

  Musso bit down on an irrational urge to snap at her, instead keeping his voice as level and non-threatening as he could. ‘Yes, Ms…?’

  ‘Oschin, sir. I thought you might need to look at these. I’ve streamed vision from eighteen webcams onto a couple of monitors at my workstation. These cams are all in high-volume public areas, General. Grand Central in New York, Daley Plaza in Chicago, that sort of thing…’

  Ensign Oschin, who was obviously uncomfortable addressing such a high-powered group, seemed to run down like a wind-up toy at that point. Musso noticed a couple of army officers glaring at her for having interrupted the big kids at play.

  ‘Go on, Ensign,’ he reassured her, giving the army jerk-offs a cold, hard glare. ‘What’s your point?’

  Oschin stood a full inch taller. ‘They’re live feeds, sir, from all over the country. And there’s nobody in them. Anywhere.’

  That information fell like a lead weight into a dark, bottomless well, tumbling down out of sight. No one spoke as Musso held Oschin’s gaze, seeing the fear gnawing away at her carefully arranged professional mask. He could taste a trace of bile at the back of his throat and he was unable to stop his thoughts straying to his family back home in Galveston. The boys would both be in school, and Marlene would be up to her elbows in blue rinse at the salon. He allowed himself the indulgence of a quick, wordless prayer on their behalf.

  ‘Can you patch it through onto the main displays?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye sir.’

  ‘Then do so, please, as quickly as you can.’

  Oschin, a small bird-like woman, spun around and retreated to the safety of her workstation, whipping her fingers across the keyboard in a blur. Other sysops, who’d been less successful in their own endeavours to raise anyone Stateside, snuck peeks over their shoulders at the results of her work as two large Sony flat panels hanging from the ceiling suddenly filled with multiple windows displaying scenes from across the US. Oschin appeared at the map table again with a laser pointer. She laid the red dot on the first window in the upper left-hand quadrant of the nearest screen.

  ‘With your permission, General?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That’s the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota. Local time 1320 hours. You’re looking at the main food court.’

  It was empty. A small fire burned in one concession stand and it looked as though sprinklers may have tripped, but the image quality wasn’t clear enough to be certain. It reminded Musso of an old zombie flick he’d watched as a kid. Dawn of the Dead or something. For some reason, his flesh crawled at the memory, even though he’d thought the movie was a dumbass piece of crap the first time he’d seen it. Oschin flicked the laser pointer over the next three windows as a group.

  ‘Disneyland, California. Local time 1120 hours. You’re looking at the concourse just inside the main entrance. Then you have Space Mountain in Tomorrowland. And finally Mickey’s Toontown.’

  Again, the pictures were poor in quality, but no less disturbing because of it. Not a soul moved anywhere in them. A breeze pushed litter around the main concourse, where some sort of golf buggy had run up on a gutter and tipped over. The young officer, her voice wavering, laid the red dot on a couple of piles of smoking rags. ‘I think they may have been clothes, sir.’

  Nobody replied, possibly because they all felt as sick in the gut as Musso. Oschin waited a second, then made her way through the rest of the image windows. Crown Center in Kansas City. Half-a-dozen cams from UCLA’s Berkeley campus. A mortgage brokers’ convention in Toledo. The main strip in Vegas – which looked like Satan’s wrecker’s yard, with cars all piled into each other and burning fiercely. Venice Beach. JFK Airport. The Strand in Galveston…

  Musso arranged his features into a blank facade for that one. He’d already recognised the scene before Oschin had explained what they were looking at. Down in his meat, right down in the oldest animal parts of his being, he knew his family were gone.

  Oblivious to the personal import of what she’d just shown them, Ensign Oschin carried on, cycling through a list of public gathering places that should have been teeming with people. All of them abandoned or empty, or… what?

  ‘It’s the Rapture,’ whispered an army major standing directly across the table from Musso. He was one of the two who’d unsettled Oschin a few minutes ago. ‘The end of days.’

  Musso spoke up loudly and aggressively, smacking down on the first sign of anyone in this command unravelling. ‘Major, if it was the Rapture, don’t you think you’d be gone by now? And where are the sinners? Don’t they get to stay and party? And last time I heard, this thing has a defined horizon, not too far north of here.’

  Chastened and not a little put out, the major, whose name-tag read Clarence, clamped his mouth shut again.

  Musso wished, for once in his life, that someone was giving him orders as opposed to the other way around. This was one football he didn’t want to run with. He didn’t know what to make of the video streaming out of his homeland. After 9/11 he didn’t think anything could surprise him again. He’d been ready for the day he flicked on the television and saw mushroom clouds blooming over an American city. But this… this was bullshit.

  ‘Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar…’

  The distinct popping sound of gunfire in the middle distance crackled out of a set of speakers. Then came the screams.

  ‘George,’ growled Musso.

  ‘I’m on it, sir.’

  His second-in-command hurried out of the room to track down the source of this new disturbance. Musso waited for more shots, but none came.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m not sending any more assets into this thing, whatever it is. I think we’ve established that it’s a no-go zone.’

  Both of the helicopters he’d ordered to fly north over international waters had apparently crashed soon after crossing the line that now defined the edge of the phenomenon.

  ‘Okay. Let’s call up Pacom…’ he started to say.

  ‘General, pardon me, sir. Permission to report?’

  A fresh-faced Marine butterbar in full battle rattle appeared in the doorway, his dark features unaffected by the recent turn of events.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Musso.

  ‘It’s the Cubans, sir. They’ve sent a delegation in through the minefield. They want to talk. Matter of fact, they’re dying to. One of their vehicles hit a mine coming in and the others just kept on rolling.’

  Musso stretched and rolled his neck, which had begun to ache with a deep muscle cramp. He was probably hunching his shoulders again. Marlene said she could tell a mile off when he was really pissed, because he seized up like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Marlene… Oh my god…

  ‘Okay,’ he said quickly. ‘Disarm them and bring them in. They’re a few miles closer to it, whatever it is. They might have seen s
omething we haven’t.’

  The lieutenant acknowledged the order and hurried away, weaving around Stavros, who returned at the same moment.

  ‘I’m afraid a bunch of our guests decided to charge a guard detail,’ he said, explaining the gunshots of just a few minutes ago. Things were moving so quickly that Musso had stopped caring about the incident as soon as it had failed to escalate. ‘Two dead, five wounded. They’ve heard something is up. They think Osama’s let off a nuke or something. The camps are locked down now.’

  Musso took in the report and decided it didn’t need any more of his attention. ‘Folks, right now, I gotta say this. I don’t think bin Laden or any of those raghead motherfuckers had anything to do with this. I think it’s much bigger. But what the hell it is, I have no idea.’

  The live feed from Oschin’s webcam trawl stuttered along above his head. Mocking them all.