Solar Storm (Survival EMP Book 1)

by Rob Lopez

He drifted out onto the road, taking one dazed step, then another. Before he knew it he was running.

  Lightning forked down and hit a street light with a terrible crack. The sky glowed like blood and Josh felt he was running witless through hell, but he couldn’t stop himself. A sense of panic gripped him. People stood on their porches, looking at this half naked kid running barefoot along the road, but Josh paid them no heed. His feet were flying but he still wasn’t going fast enough. All the while he thought this couldn’t be happening. People didn’t die in their homes so helplessly without someone doing something. There were nurses and doctors and paramedics who should be stopping this. He’d heard enough times about the things people paid their taxes for. Surely that was for something.

  He was just a kid and he was running down the street because society wasn’t honoring its obligation to take care of folks. What was the point of everything if it could just fall down so fast? Why the hell was he having to do this?

  He ran down North Caswell Road, seeing transmission lines down and sparking. It didn’t make sense to him. The street lights were all out and yet electricity flowed in sparks out of the cables. How was that possible?

  He seriously considered that he was in a dream – the kind where he was being chased by bears or falling to no end. He’d wake in his bed soon and he’d make a point of not eating whatever it was that gave him nightmares. And he’d go to bed early. And not cuss so much. Whatever it took for him to wake up and find Grandpa was okay, wearing his ridiculous shorts and playing with the remote while he watched his stupid sports commentaries.

  Josh hated sports, and hated running. He hated jocks and PT instructors. He hated having to do this, but he felt gripped. His fear powered him along like the biggest sugar rush of his life.

  He reached the entrance of the ER at the rear of the Presbyterian Medical Center. Josh joined a line of people going in. Some were being helped to walk by their friends, several were badly burned. Inside there were candles burning. A triage nurse with a clipboard inspected everyone who came in. She took one look at Josh’s cut and bloody feet and pointed to a corner. “You don’t look so bad. Wait over there. Someone will bring bandages.”

  After all the fire of his run, Josh meekly did as he was told, overwhelmed by the vision of so many sick and wounded people. The room was packed and echoed with moans of pain. Josh was transfixed by the sight of one man whose face was so scorched, his pale white eyeballs seemed out of place, like they had more life than the charred skin stretched over his cheekbones.

  Down the corridors, staff shouted instructions and orderlies walked around carrying fire extinguishers. Nurses with candles dripped wax on the floor, and moving gurneys trailed it in glistening lines that lit up whenever thunder flashes crashed outside.

  Awkwardly aware of having given the wrong impression, Josh approached the triage nurse. “Excuse me, I’m not here for me.”

  The nurse, stressed out, tried to wave him away. “Just wait over there. Someone will see you.”

  Josh tried again. “It’s my grandpa. He needs an ambulance.”

  “Got none of those,” said the nurse, examining bruises on a man’s face. “All ambulances are down. Can’t do anything about it.”

  “He’s having a heart attack.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about that from here. I’d give you a defibrillator, but they ain’t working either. If he wants help, you need to bring him in.”

  “I can’t,” pleaded Josh. “He needs an ambulance.”

  The nurse turned on him. “Listen, kid. I worked in the Sudan for a year, and the people out there didn’t have ambulances. If they needed a hospital, their family brought them in.”

  Josh stared at her, as if he’d been slapped. The nurse half-turned away, looking guilty. “Hey, I’m sorry...” she began.

  Josh didn’t hear the rest. He pushed past the line and ran outside. In the parking lot, he burst into tears.

  The journey home was the longest walk of his life. He’d been given his first adult test and he’d failed it. When he reached the house, he could hear the sobs and wails through the open door and knew his worse fears had been realized. Too embarrassed to enter, he sat on the stoop with his head in his hands, watching the blood dripping off his toes.

  9

  Rick felt blood dripping on his face. He knew it was blood because he could taste it. Lifting up the weight that pressed on him, he saw it was a headless corpse strapped to a flight seat. In the light of the flames, he saw the name tape on the shirt: Skip Saunders.

  Throwing the corpse off, he rolled over and spat on the ground, trying to get rid of whatever might have entered his mouth. In spite of having seen enough dead bodies in his time he still had to fight the urge to gag.

  Leroy emerged from under a scorched fuselage panel. “What the hell happened?” he said.

  Rick didn’t know. His first thought was that the plane had been shot down, but the JSTAR flew at too high an altitude for ISIS too reach. The lightning and the static in the air was the strangest phenomenon he’d ever experienced. Did this have anything to do with the solar storm he’d been warned about?

  This was more than just a little interference.

  “Are you okay?” said Leroy. “Have you been hit?”

  Flinging the panel aside, Leroy clambered over the wreckage to get to him.

  “It’s okay,” said Rick. “It’s not my blood.”

  Leroy looked down at the headless corpse and the clumps of burning debris around them. “Jesus, this is like Armageddon. What the hell’s going on?”

  “It’s not a drill. That’s what’s going on,” said Rick. “We need to move. We’ll figure this stuff out later.”

  Over by the farm, the fighters were in a jubilant mood. They considered this a great victory, and for the moment appeared to have forgotten the small team of special forces operators they were originally after. It wouldn’t take them long to start combing the wreckage, though, looking for spoils.

  Keeping low in the gully, Rick and Leroy made their way down to the dry stream bed at the bottom of the slope. From there, they were hidden from the farm.

  Walt was sitting on the ground, naked from the waist up and a large dressing on his side, above the hip. Blood was smeared across his chest and stomach, and he looked pale. Rick glanced at Flynn.

  “Did the best I could, man,” said Flynn.

  “Our radios are all out,” said Jamie. “That’s weird.”

  Rick tried out his night vision goggles, switching them on. They didn’t work. As a final test, he got his satellite phone out and installed the battery. That didn’t work either.

  Even without its battery, something had fried its circuits.

  “Check the second hand on your watches,” Rick told the others.

  “Mine’s stopped,” said Flynn.

  “Mine too. What the fuck?”

  “EMP,” said Rick. “It’s taken everything out. It’s what’s brought the planes down.”

  “EMP?” said Jamie. “That’s a nuclear strike, right?”

  “No, not a nuclear strike.” Rick took his compass out, looking for a reading. The needle wavered, then flicked left and right randomly. “It’s bigger than that.”

  Not wanting to explain further, Rick gave his orders. “We need to get to that pilot. I’ll take point. Leroy, you’ve got the rear. Are you okay to move, Walt?”

  Walt nodded.

  “Good. Flynn, you keep an eye on him. Let’s go.”

  The lurid sky meant they had no need for night vision goggles, even if they could get them working. Everything was scarlet. It reminded Rick of some scene on Mars. He was more into Westerns than Sci-Fi movies, but he could well imagine Matt Damon stepping out of his pod into the inhospitable, unforgiving landscape.

  Or George Clooney in a spacesuit falling from the sky.

  He had a feeling that was a different movie, but after seeing the JSTAR come down, it didn’t feel like fiction no more. He wondered if the Skip Saunders he�
��d seen had known the risks of staying airborne. Surely the air force would have given them that information? Rick felt bad about not moving out earlier. And the haste that led him to blunder into that ISIS patrol was a noob’s mistake.

  Or just plain complacency.

  If his heart wasn’t in the job, he should have quit. Technically knowing his stuff wasn’t enough. Not for this. Fact was, you had to love this job to stay alive. As soon as you strayed off the path, you were on your way to becoming a condolence telegram, and no amount of acting or kidding yourself would lengthen the odds.

  He’d spent some time with the British SAS once at their base in Hereford, and was intrigued by the fact that they referred to themselves as Pilgrims. If they were alive, they felt that they’d 'beat the clock’, meaning they hadn’t had their names inscribed as casualties on the clock tower at the base. Because in the end, it was only a matter of time, and everyone knew it. It took a kind of religious vocation to continue in the face of that.

  Not even stunning self-belief could survive such a continuous stream of hazardous operations. Ego was just a flaccid bag of hot air once the bullets started flying.

  His failure to recognize he’d reached his limit was risking lives, his own included.

  The stream bed dissipated into a series of runnels, then disappeared. Behind, he could see the farm and the roaming fighters clearly. It wouldn’t be long before they wondered where the infidels had gone. The ridge ended in a steep scarp that overlooked a plunging valley of scrub and rocks before flattening out into a wide, arid plain. A red and white parachute lay draped over a worn pillar – some artifact that might once have marked the border of a province, or the beginning of a road.

  Rick realized he still had his useless deflector sight on his rifle. Removing the quick release screws, he discarded the unit, going back to iron sights. The lightning flashes dissipated, limiting themselves to the cloud base. Distant peals of thunder rolled across the sky, and the shouts of jihadists carried across the desert.

  Keeping low, Rick approached the parachute, finding the disconnected harness. The others dropped down behind him in a line while he searched for clues to the pilot’s whereabouts.

  Seeing no sign of him, Rick wondered where he might have gone. Undoubtedly, he was hiding, fearful of capture. Was he down in the valley or had he climbed the scarp?

  “Rick!”

  That was Leroy. Rick looked back and saw ISIS fighters following the stream bed. Rick made his choice.

  He couldn’t waste time searching. If there was going to be a firefight, he preferred the high ground.

  The jihadists spotted them when they were still climbing. Bullets zipped and cracked as Rick clambered onto the ridge. From the top, he could see another line of pickups in the distance. The vehicles were stationary – stopped by the EMP – and figures sallied out from them, moving towards the gunfire. They were too far away, however, and Rick wasn’t worried about them.

  Not just yet.

  Lying flat on the ground, he steadied himself and aimed his rifle at the ISIS fighters below. The stream bed offered them no cover, and Rick had a clear line of sight. There were only about seven of them, and Rick lined one up in his sights and squeezed the trigger.

  The first shot kicked up dust to one side of the jihadist, causing him to flinch. Rick’s second shot dropped him to the ground. The other jihadists stopped their confident spray of bullets and hit the dirt. Rick lined up another one as the rest of his team made the top of the ridge. One by one, they joined in, hitting the jihadists with precision shots. When Leroy set up his machine gun and opened fire, the small group of jihadists were pinned down, bleeding, dying or playing dead.

  Rick used the respite to assess the situation. From the crash site, more figures were moving towards them, firing inaccurate shots at long range. Behind, over by the stationary convoy, more figures advanced in a ragged line.

  The only way out for Rick and his team was across the plain. Rick didn’t like that idea. Apart from having no cover, it meant heading west – or what he thought was west. That would take them deeper into territory governed by other factions.

  In the kaleidoscope of militias that constituted Syria’s civil war, it was hard to say who would be friendly and who wouldn’t.

  Rick peered over into the valley at the foot of the scarp. It didn’t take long for him to see the F16 pilot, curled up behind a rock, his pistol out.

  “Scotty. Get down to that pilot. Check him out. Let me know if he can walk.”

  Scott rolled over and slid down the slope while the rest of the team sniped at whatever moved in the stream bed. Rick wondered what he would do if the pilot was injured. He’d made it to his location from his parachute, but he might have crawled. If he’d broken his leg, or worse, Rick wasn’t sure how they’d be able to get him across the plain. He was already worried about Walt. He seemed okay at the moment, but if he’d lost a lot of blood, the fast trek across the plain would be hard for him.

  He definitely wasn’t leaving Walt. As for the pilot... Rick didn’t know what he’d do.

  A heavy machine gun from the stationary vehicles at the farm opened fire, the tracer arcing high and falling onto the scarp, the heavy bullets punching chunks out of the hard soil. Rick ducked involuntarily. The weapon was off target, but the 12.7mm ammunition it used was powerful enough to take a man’s head off with one hit. Sticking around much longer wasn’t wise.

  Scott reached the pilot and engaged in some hasty conversation. When he turned and gave the thumbs up, Rick was relieved.

  “Okay, let’s move out now. Go, go, go!”

  10

  Lauren wasn’t happy with the airport security guard’s cast-off reassurances. As someone pointed out, nobody was in a position to receive texts, and being told to go home was of no help to her. There wasn’t much else the guy could say, obviously. He wasn’t really in the loop.

  Didn’t mean she was going to pay him any heed, though.

  Lauren walked along the express road until she reached an elevated section with a view over the runways. Stranded drivers stood along the rail, eyeing the spectacle. Lauren joined them.

  An airliner stood burning at a terminal gate, dripping molten alloys. Ground control staff and mechanics crowded round a nearby aircraft, trying to push it away from the burning wreck. Towing vehicles stood near the baggage conveyors, totally useless. The crowd heaved, barely moving the heavy plane, then a fuel tank on the burning plane exploded, sending flaming aviation fuel in all directions. The crowd scattered, stumbling as they tried to get away, and lines of burning fuel caught on the wing of the plane they’d been trying to push.

  Lauren had a feeling things weren’t about to get back to normal for a while.

  She knew enough about EMP effects to know that every circuit board, every avionics suite chip, was useless now. The only way to get the planes in the air again would be to replace every board, every radar, every radio on the planes.

  Not to mention the electronics used by air traffic control.

  New parts would have to shipped in – but how would they get here? Hell, even the ordering system would be down. And if the machines that made the parts were controlled by computers, which they were, the problem was doubled.

  Lauren wondered how far the damage spread. Was it just the east coast affected? Or more?

  “Why are those guys not trying to put the fire out?” asked a spectator.

  “Fire trucks won’t move,” said another. “Just like us.”

  A solemn silence descended on the group. The idea that everything could fail at once took some contemplating.

  A turbaned cab driver with a fringed Sikh flag hanging from his rear-view slammed down the hood of his car after trying unsuccessfully to fix it. “I cannot believe it!” he said. “First Uber takes our fares, now this!”

  *

  The night’s red glow segued into dawn’s gray light, the overcast hiding the sky as if ashamed of what it had done. The lightning had ceased, but th
e smell of ozone persisted, and drivers got static shocks from their car doors. The air still felt electric.

  Lauren walked among the vehicles on the freeway, watching the vain attempts to restart engines. Only an old dirt bike still ran, its engine putt-putting raggedly as it weaved through the traffic. Every now and again it cut out, and the rider would hammer the kick-start until it ran again. He would pass Lauren at a cautious pace, then Lauren would pass him as he sweated to restart it, over and over. Even simple electric coils had been damaged by the storm.

  Back on Broad Street, acrid fumes were building as a smog settled on the city. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the top ten floors of the Prudential building were ablaze. Like beacons in the fog, Lauren could see the upper floors of other blocks alight in the city. Firefighters trooped like a line of soldiers to the biggest fire, each carrying loops of hose. Without the engines, they had to carry their own equipment.

  Connecting the hose to a fire hydrant, they tested the pressure. A jet of water shot up for about ten feet, then drooped as the pressure fell. With the municipal pumps out, the city’s water supply was already dwindling.

  A handful of cops tried to keep the crowd of gawkers at bay, urging people to keep moving back and closing off Broad Street.

  Lauren detoured down Clinton Street, heading towards Penn Station. Showers of burnt paper floated down like snow. The glass fronted towers of the commercial distRickt loomed ominously, each one potentially hiding another fire. Lauren hastened on to the train station, slowing when she saw the crowds gathered outside the closed doors.

  One look at the electricity lines running above the tracks told her all she needed to know. She’d already seen the stranded freight trains from the elevated freeway and had kidded herself that a diesel train might still be running.

  Until the tracks were cleared, however, nothing could move. It could take days. Maybe weeks.

  Lauren still didn’t want to believe what was happening.

  It just wasn’t possible.

  Like a person in catatonic shock, she wandered aimlessly up the street, data switching back and forth in her mind. Reaching a small cafe on a corner, she opened the door and entered.