by TM Catron
“Where’d you get it?”
“It’s mine. An extra.”
What sort of man needed two sidearms and a rifle? A bitter taste rose in Mina’s mouth. She looked at the pistol, hands at her sides.
“Well?” he asked. “Do you know how to use it?”
“Yes, but I’d rather not.”
“You’d rather not.” A muscle twitched in Doyle’s neck. “How are you going to protect yourself?”
“I don’t need a gun.”
Doyle snorted. “You needed one yesterday.”
“That was different.”
“It always is when you’re trying to defend yourself. Take the gun.” Again he held out the small firearm.
Mina wrapped her arms around herself, thinking. She didn’t want it. Didn’t want the responsibility. Didn't want to accept what he was saying. What would she have done yesterday if she’d had a gun? Mina couldn’t answer the question. But with Reed’s face still leering in her mind, she reached for the pistol. She knew she didn’t want it at her side like Doyle’s, where anyone could see it. She looked at the holster, which had a small clip for a belt.
“Clip it on your waistband at your back,” Doyle advised. “Are you sure you know how to use it?”
“My dad taught me.” She attached it like he said. Her jacket covered it completely.
“How long ago?”
Mina thought about it a moment. “Eighteen years.”
Doyle sighed. “Don’t waste bullets. Only use it if you have to. For most people, simply waving a gun at them will be enough to scare them off.” He nodded to the backpack at her feet. “Use that one.”
The pack was full of gear and must have weighed twenty pounds. Inside it was a fixed blade knife, a thick grey blanket, granola bars, and . . . Boots. Men’s leather boots with thick soles and sturdy uppers. She stopped digging through the bag when she saw them, pulling them out immediately. “Where did you get these?”
“From someone who doesn’t need them anymore. Please tell me you don’t have anything against better shoes.”
Ignoring Doyle, Mina didn’t waste any time trying them on. They fit too snugly around her bruised feet, but the lined boots already warmed her numb toes. “Thank you,” she said.
Doyle nodded. “So,” he said as he adjusted his own pack. “How did you end up in the creek?”
Mina hated to admit it. “I fell asleep.”
“And then it rained.”
“Yes.”
“Obviously you’ve been taking a risk with drinking water. What have you been eating?”
“Anything I can choke down. When you’re hungry, everything looks good.”
Doyle pulled a granola bar from his bag and tossed it to her. She tore it open and broke off a tiny piece to swallow.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“I’m looking for my brother. He was supposed to be in Atlanta.”
“Atlanta’s gone.”
Mina broke off another piece. “Do you know for sure?”
“Towers landed there, too.”
“But you don’t know?”
“No. I don’t know.”
Mina swallowed another piece of granola. The action sent more pain through the side of her face. She tried to avoid thinking about Atlanta for the moment, concentrating on finishing her breakfast. Doyle watched her eat, his eyes unnerving her as he seemingly stared at something she couldn’t see. She shook off the discomfort. “Where are you going?”
“The mountains.”
Mina nodded, “If you’re right . . .”
“I’m right.”
“. . . and the Glyphs destroyed only the cities with towers, then the small towns in the mountains might be havens.”
“I don’t think so. The ships are heading west. If the Glyphs are concerned about small groups of men on trails, they’ll find the towns.”
“Then why are you going there?” asked Mina, annoyed.
“It’s still a good place to hide, especially for only one or two people.”
Mina took a deep breath. “Are you saying I could go with you?”
“Only if you keep up. I travel fast.”
“I can keep up. I’ve run a marathon every year for the last eight years.”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean you can keep up, but it’s a start.”
“One more question,” she asked.
He nodded.
“Why are you helping me?”
Doyle sighed. “Be on your guard. Don’t trust anyone, not even me.” Doyle met her eyes as he said this.
He has very dark eyes, she thought, the skin of her arms prickling. Mina held his gaze, but she could not tell what kind of man he was simply by looking into his eyes. She would have to make that decision on instinct alone.
“Are you coming with me or not?” he asked.
“I’ll come,” Mina said finally. “But I’m still looking for my brother.” She pushed away the thought of a smoldering Atlanta.
“Okay.” Doyle turned away and picked up his backpack. Without a glance back, he set off down the hill.
Reaching the mountains took all day and part of another because Doyle insisted they stay out of the open. He set a grueling pace through the trees, zigzagging around fields, and Mina struggled to keep up, especially with the pain in her feet and the heavy backpack weighing her down. But Doyle would not slow down for her. At the end of the first long day Mina collapsed at their campsite and fell asleep immediately. Doyle woke her to eat. As soon as she had eliminated some of the gnawing hunger pangs, she went back to sleep, enjoying the first decent rest she’d had in two weeks.
At noon on the second day, they paused to rest at the foot of the first real mountains. They had traipsed up and down foothills all day, and Mina was exhausted.
“Well, we’re here. Now what?” she asked as she took a sip of water. Although still stiff and swollen, Mina’s jaw had healed enough that she could talk without excruciating pain.
“We keep moving. We need to get over the ridge and set up camp by nightfall.”
“Can we light a fire tonight?” He had not allowed one the night before.
“No. And tonight’s your turn to keep watch.” Doyle put his own water back in his bag.
“You mean you haven’t been sleeping? Were you up all last night?”
“Yes.”
“What about the night before that?”
“Yes.”
Mina’s cheeks burned. Doyle had watched over her each night while she slept soundly. And he had fed her and found her water, and she had let him take care of her while he went without sleep. “How are you even standing?”
Doyle looked at her coldly. “I thought you would take care of yourself. What have you been doing out here all this time?”
“I’m . . . sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You don’t seem to do much thinking, but you need to start pulling your weight. You’re not on your own anymore. If you make a mistake, we’ll both pay for it. I need you to think about what’s going on around you instead of just following along in a daze.”
“You’re right. I’ve just been so . . . I . . .” Mina’s voice broke, but she swallowed her tears. “What do you need me to do?”
“Tonight just take the first watch and let me sleep a few hours. All you have to do is wake me if you hear anything suspicious.”
Mina nodded. Tears still threatened to spill down her cheeks, but she was determined not to let Doyle see her cry. She stood up and looked at the maze of trees that covered the steep mountain. Thunder rumbled in the distance. They could make it to the top before dark. Her worn-out legs burned with every step, but she didn’t want him to know how tired she was. So she began the ascent without waiting for him, to show him that she did not always need someone else to lead the way. Doyle followed in silence.
DAY 16
“THAT’S TEN KNOWN METROPOLITAN AREAS. Confirmed cascading power grid failure everywhere else.”
“W
hat about enemy activity? Over.”
“Reports of destruction of heavily populated areas, moving inland to Appalachia, also the Rockies . . . Also reports of smaller attacks in mountains where large groups of survivors are gathering.”
Lincoln stood with Nelson outside the communications tent in the middle of camp. Nelson carried his backpack on his shoulders—he still refused to go anywhere without his laptop. The tent flap was propped open, and they could see Nash inside, gripping the back of the operator’s chair. The operator was talking to a man from Montana, an off-grid survivalist who’d ridden out the attacks in the backcountry of the Absaroka mountain range. About twenty soldiers gathered around, crowding the tent and spilling out under the trees.
“What about central command?” asked the operator. “Anyone heard from them? Over.”
“Negative. I can’t confirm there is a central command. All of our contacts so far have been amateur operators. You’re the first military unit we’ve found. Over.”
Nelson nudged Lincoln. “This can’t be the only hardened radio the military owns,” he said quietly. “We know the government has protected systems, so why aren’t they broadcasting?” Hardened electronics were those that had been shielded from an electromagnetic pulse. After much debate, the team had concluded a powerful EMP was the most likely cause of the widespread blackouts. Although they had suspected it when convoy vehicles had stalled simultaneously, and their cell phones and computers died at the same time, they had hoped it was localized. But the ensuing radio silence and trickle-in reports proved that theory to be wildly optimistic.
Lincoln shrugged. “Maybe they can’t for some reason. Or maybe it’s a tactical decision. Maintaining radio silence while they plan their next move.”
“Yeah, but listen—all those units were moving into affected cities before the attack. All those cities are destroyed. If any armed forces survived, you’d think they’d scramble to make contact and regroup.”
Lincoln rubbed the back of his neck. “There’s got to be a reasonable explanation. They’re certain to be using protected networks we don’t know about, not open airwaves.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Nelson lowered his voice to a whisper as the operator signed off. People began to disperse. A tall woman with captain’s double bars on her collar walked past, frowning at the two civilians. Nelson waited until she passed. “Nash would know about them, wouldn’t he? And you’d think he’d have brought more sophisticated, protected battle equipment. But he seems to have nothing.”
“I’ve thought about that,” answered Lincoln as they began to walk past the drab olive mess tent that looked even more dingy in the pale morning sunshine. “A lot of this doesn’t add up. They hurry us out here, pretending it’s vitally important, but when we arrive, we’re crippled by both a lack of information and technology. We have a few running vehicles for power, but no generators. Tents and food, but only one working radio for contacting the outside. No one thought to send computers or any special equipment to help us with this.” Nash and a couple of the others had computers with them, of course, but they were fried, like everything else. “And we’re missing what could be the most important resource of all—someone to tell us what in creation we are supposed to be doing here in the first place. They have our models—why didn’t they employ them using their own people?”
“I think we know why. We were sent out here in a hurry with the intention of resupply, but everything was attacked. I wonder if anyone even knows we’re here.”
“Is that why Cummings or his people didn’t meet us, like he said they would?”
“Either that or somebody didn’t want him helping us,” muttered Nelson conspiratorially. “Someone who didn’t want us doing our job.”
“Like who?” Lincoln smiled. “Conspiracy theories make more sense today than they did a few months ago, but why would someone sabotage ARCHIE? Assuming it was worth sabotaging, that is.”
“Without Cummings, we may never know.”
Alvarez hurried over to them as they reached their tents. Lincoln was camping in his own tent again, though he still felt weak and was silently grateful to ease onto the log he used as a chair.
“Hey guys!” said Alvarez brightly. “I just heard about the broadcast. What’d we find out?”
Nelson sat near the low fire and stuck his feet as close to its warmth as he could tolerate. “In addition to Atlanta, New York, and DC, they've confirmed Chicago, Denver, Phoenix, LA, Seattle, Kansas City, and Houston.”
Alvarez sank down into a dusty camp chair. “Didn’t all those metro areas have alien towers?”
“I think so. In addition to about thirty other cities in the US. Not to mention the hundreds worldwide. And get this—they weren’t towers. They were ships.”
“Ships? As in flying-around-in-the-sky ships?”
“Yeah. Think about all the video footage, the speculation. And the aliens had already landed.” Nelson glanced down at his dirty Space Invaders t-shirt.
Alvarez pushed her glasses up her nose. “Do you think all of those other places are gone, too?” Her cheerful demeanor had sobered, her voice was quiet.
Neither Nelson nor Lincoln answered. Voicing it would make it true. Instead Lincoln asked, “Where’s Carter?”
Alvarez cleared her throat. “He went fishing.”
“Oh.” Lincoln should have guessed. Carter had found a secret fishing hole and disappeared there on fine days. Lincoln pulled the damaged sketchbook out of his pocket and flipped through the stained, torn pages. Before the attacks, Carter would have taken the book fishing with him, in case he had an idea he couldn’t wait to write down.
Nelson shrugged off his backpack and tossed it aside. Then he got up and retrieved his blanket from his tent. He wrapped it around his shoulders before returning to the fire. “Do you think the ships triggered multiple EMPs? It makes sense, doesn’t it? Although I don’t know why they’d want so many when one big pulse could have wiped out everything.”
Prevailing theory conjectured that a large nuclear bomb detonated high in the ionosphere would create an EMP powerful enough to cause physical damage to power delivery systems and other sensitive modern electronics within hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles from the blast sight. Modern equipment was especially susceptible to the initial wave because the current generated from the pulse would overload and melt the tiny, delicate circuit boards. The team suspected this first wave, called an E1, had taken out their electronics. Large bombs could also cause another response, an E3, seconds after the first, which would travel over the long lines connecting power plants and substations, causing further damage and blackouts. This was known as cascading power grid failure.
Small instances of these waves had been tested. But on a wider scale, like a whole nation such as the United States, testing was obviously out of the question. Dissenting voices claimed even a powerful EMP was incapable of causing the destruction of everything at once, but almost all experts agreed recovery from a massive attack could take years. Even undamaged substations that automatically shutdown during a power surge would require power from an external source to restart. Simply flipping a switch wouldn’t turn them back on, and replacing damaged custom-built parts took months under normal circumstances. No one knew precisely how long America would be without power. And the country’s interdependence on automated computer systems meant more catastrophes were inevitable.
“But they didn’t detonate a nuclear bomb, did they?” asked Alvarez. “Do we know?”
“They could have,” Lincoln answered. “We don’t have any evidence of one here, but what about our nukes? Nuclear facilities and subs are protected from EMPs. Why didn’t they launch?”
“We don’t know they didn’t,” said Alvarez.
Nelson shook his head. “We would have heard about it on the radio.”
“I don’t know,” answered Lincoln. “Survivors with radios are scattered all over, hiding. Would they have seen the fallout?”
“For a moment let�
��s say the aliens didn’t use nukes, and obviously we wouldn’t have detonated them in our own ionosphere, so how would the relatively small ships be able to create such a widespread E3 response?”
“I think,” said Lincoln, “if they were able to place the ships overnight without anyone seeing them, then it follows they have the technology to generate an EMP that doesn’t risk destroying the Earth but still cripples our infrastructure. They wanted to be thorough.”
“So they need our planet for something, then?” Alvarez asked the question rhetorically, her eyes fixed on the trees overhead.
“Seems like it.”
Nelson took out his wallet from his jeans pocket and opened it. A wad of hundred dollar bills, folded in various shapes or crinkled, had been shoved inside. Citing bank failures and privacy concerns, Nelson always carried large sums of cash with him, using it as much as possible. He took out the bills one by one and smoothed them against his leg, straightening them carefully into a stack. Lincoln glanced around to see if anyone else was looking. Nelson finished lining up the bills and rolled them lengthwise into a straw. Then he stuck one end in the fire.
Alvarez cried out, “What are you doing?” and rushed to grab the bills from Nelson. But they had already caught fire, looking like a ludicrous green birthday candle in his hand.
Nelson held it up and watched it burn, a look of displaced satisfaction on his face. “They’re worthless now, anyway.”
“Nelson, you’re crazy. You don’t know that for sure!”
“Come on, Alvarez.” His voice remained calm. “Major civilian and government infrastructures have been destroyed. Telecommunications, financial systems, not to mention the disruption of transportation and food distribution. It’s over.” The bills burned toward Nelson’s fingertips. He threw the remainder into the fire. “We’re on our own.”
A stray thunderstorm obscured Calla’s view of the mountains below. The Nomad dipped below it, into the cloud cover, but the lashing rain toyed with her readings. Where was he? As she flew over a large encampment, tiny heat signatures glowed in front of her. The topographical display showed most of the clumps in the valley with tendrils of red creeping up the surrounding mountain slopes. No one had reported this camp yet, so either she had discovered it first or rogues were hiding there. She pulled up a different overlay of the same area. Yes, two resided here. Calla refrained from contacting them, however, unwilling to alert them of her presence if they were rogue. She would return.