Part Two: Savagery
“A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate.”
- BARONESS EMMUSKA ORCZY, 1905
Chapter 13
Battered KOMO employees climb out of their stairwell’s narrow opening, pushing chunks of rock and dirt aside. They walk out on either side of a kneeling body covered in dust. Ash blankets his broad shoulders. The newsroom survivors move around him, squinting up into the stinging rain. Light from a blood-red sun does not warm them. It does not calm. It’s as if the very heat has been sucked from it, leaving only the seeping color of the lost.
“Jesus,” someone whispers. The voice sounds like thunder across the silent expanse.
Swirling winds throw fragments and debris high into the air. Hot gusts peel at what remains of Seattle, scraping its bones with an acidic touch. A layer of chalky white powder covers stone and metal. All across the charred horizons, once massive buildings are simply gone. The stumps of their deeply-rooted girders are the only proof they were ever there, torn off just above the piles of broken asphalt.
Documents rain down upon a shattered society. Once the informational backbone of one of America’s greatest cities, the all-important memos and paperwork now twist indiscriminately through the sky.
“Jonathon,” a faint voice says. The black man wipes hypnotically at his glasses with the bottom of a blood-stained tie. The obsessively immaculate creative director kneels at the foot of the rubble. His suit is torn and covered in a dirty gray.
Jean Barlow slowly walks toward him. Stepping over pieces of concrete, she looks back at the man kneeling almost piously in the chaos. Her thin frame starkly reveals the various plastic surgeries she’s used to help climb the television ranks under male superiors. But none of that matters now. Nothing matters at all anymore.
Her attractive Korean features are filled with a confused sort of sorrow. Jean’s long black hair and piercing eyes whip around with uncertainty at the heated winds pushing across the flattened landscape. “Jonathon,” she says more loudly, laying a delicate hand on his shoulder.
He spins, jumping to his feet.
Jean screams, “It’s me, Jon!” She’s never seen that look in his eyes before. It’s terrifying. Primal. It frightens her enough to step back from the man she thought she knew so well — even loved. But that was like an eternity ago.
Her violet contacts scan down, stopping at the blood that covers the bottom of his tie. “Are you okay?”
The fearful readiness of a caged animal stares back. He clenches and unclenches his fists. Jonathon stares past her, through her…into the black opening of death at the stairwell beyond.
“Jon?”
He finally turns, looking at the damage all around them.
Jean inventories the handful of people above ground. “Where are all the others?” her voice shakes. Jean grits her teeth, fighting against the emotions she never allows to crack through. Her eyes fill with tears, but she refuses to let them fall
Traffic coming through the small opening at the stairs has now stopped. Even the moaning sobs of horror have fallen quiet from the black.
“Are we all that’s left?” she whispers. Only sadness and disbelief look back at her. No one dares the words.
Pushing her humanity down, Jean switches back into the journalistic detachment she knows so well. It’s liberating almost, like wearing a mask on Halloween. “The station needs its news director right now. Where’s Mitch?” Her eyes drift back to Jonathon. A plea for structure and purpose cries out from within them.
“He, uh…” Jonathon looks down at his scuffed leather shoes. He shivers, feeling cold hands grasping for him through the shadows. The helpless moans of the dead still echo—down in the darkness of the newsroom…
Jean taps her right foot impatiently. “That son of a bitch better have an action plan because I am not going to…”
“He’s dead, Jean.”
“What?!” she hisses. She puts a hand to her mouth.
“I don’t know,” Jonathon says. The knot of dread in his stomach refuses to go down into the black. “We were talking breaking news and promotions on the way to his office, and then…” he stops. “Everything just collapsed.”
Jonathon rubs at the dried blood still on his fingers, looking for absolution in the barren landscape. “Mitch is gone.”
The flattened wreckage of downtown Seattle is eerily silent. Even the birds are gone.
Crumbling debris breaks off from the second story of a building nearby. It smashes to the ground, shattering the deafening silence.
The compulsion to give orders soon silences her own doubts. “Then it falls to you,” Jean says. “You’re the CSD. We need to…”
“I don’t care who’s next in command!” Jonathon shouts. “The city is gone, Jean. We need to get the hell out of here!”
The rest of the KOMO survivors’ hushed conversations end. All eyes turn worriedly to their leaders.
“Are you kidding me?! We don’t work at Wal-Mart, Jon. This is the biggest damn story of our generation!” She shakes her head. “It’s our job. People need to know what happened here.”
“How are we supposed to tell them what we don’t know?!” Jonathon asks. He points to the scraps of burnt paper falling through the sky. “You see any letters of responsibility floating around?”
“That’s what we have to find out,” Jean says. She looks at the scared faces of her colleagues. “A lot of people died here today. Our friends, Jonathon.” Jean puts a hand gently on his shoulder. Her tone softens. “The city needs answers.”
He looks around at the place where he grew up—where he raised a family and fell in love—lying in ruins.
Lightning flickers inside the yellow storm clouds closing in over the city. The slow boom of thunder rolls across the warlike landscape.
“Can we even broadcast?” Jonathon finally asks.
“I don’t know. There were a couple of sat trucks down in the parking garage for servicing. We may be able to send out a radio signal or something with the low-power antennas.”
Jonathon’s navy blue eyes scan pile after pile of nothingness as far as they can see. Only the wind moves, sending shredded debris across a rusty sky. Jonathon turns. His voice drops to a whisper. “Who’s left to hear it?”
The question slams into Jean. It forces the breath from her lungs. The faces of her friends and family roar through her mind. Everyone she ever cared about lived within her Emerald City. They’re all dead. A single obliterating moment took everything, erasing millions of unspent lifetimes in its path.
“We have to try,” she whispers. Her lip trembles.
Jonathon sees a virgin sadness in her purple eyes. The deep and unfamiliar naivety forces him to look away. His arm twitches, wanting to reach out comfortingly and pull his former mistress to him. But his own comfort is absent, dying somewhere within the darkness of KOMO’s grave.
A piece of metal flashes on the ground. Jonathon picks up a blistered steel name plate from the rubble where their receptionist had once been.
WENDY AIKEN.
I walked by you for almost two years and didn’t even know your name… He kneels. Jonathon closes his eyes and lays the burnt gravestone back onto the pile of wreckage. “Alright.”
He looks around at the remaining KOMO employees. Their bodies are tattered and caked with dust, their expressions stunned. Heads in their hands, several openly weep under girders ripped from the earth.
Jonathon spots one of his engineers examining the destruction. Dave Jenkins’s blue polo shirt is grease-stained, his jeans recently ripped in the knee caps. In spite of his appearance, intelligence sparkles from the analytical 26-year-old’s eyes. Reporter Kevin Green stands next to him in a dusty Columbia rain jacket.
“I just spotted Dave,” Jonathon says. “If he can fix the generator, you should be able to pow
er up the last Associated Press feed.” He looks back at the lifeless wastelands as more clouds near. Diagonal slashes of rain cut across the horizon, carving their way through the dead city. “Something’s gotta be on the wires by now.”
Chapter 14
Dave pushes away the loose ceiling plates and insulation covering the 5,000-watt generator in KOMO’s basement. He pops open the fuse box. The young engineer fumbles with the small levers, flipping several back and forth to close and reset the blown fuses.
Working with a flashlight in his mouth, Dave slams the lid closed. His eyes follow the thick power cord from behind the generator up to a huge wall plate with a massive array of network cables. The tangled web of color-coded wires runs the entire height of the wall. The cluster is several feet wide, with thousands of ins and outs connecting every computer, telephone, and electronic device within the entire facility.
Dave rubs at the three-day stubble on his face. He pulls a rectangular device from his pocket, scanning down through the grid of labels. His eyes narrow. Dave’s mind cycles through the wiring diagrams and building plans imprinted on his near-photographic memory.
The optic line is underground. It should still run through the servers down at SeaTac. Reaching forward, his hands suddenly stop. Dave’s excitement quickly dims. If SeaTac’s still there…
He shakes off the thought and connects an orange bypass cable to the tangled web of wires. The M.I.T. grad touches the connection tips with the metal nose of a LAN tester. His boyish eyes flicker when the light turns green.
Swapping the mainline data cable for the fiber back-up, he turns and fires up the generator. It rumbles to life with a growl. Dave leans through the door and shouts down the hallway, “You’ve got 20 minutes!”
* * *
Back in the newsroom, dim emergency lights kick on. Police and fire scanners scream out scattered hiss and blood-chilling tones. The nightmarish sounds are deafening.
Jean leans over the assignment desk’s computers. “Get to the truck and patch in the national signal!” she shouts. “We’ll cut in if I find anything else on the feed!”
The experienced producer shivers, eying the shadows of bodies still lying at the stations where they died. Her hands start to shake. She reaches down to power up the computer, closing her violet eyes. Please…
Nothing happens.
She pushes and holds the button.
Still nothing.
Jean pulls the power cord out of the blackened surge strip and plugs it directly into the wall.
The computer’s drives suddenly spin up. “Yes!” Jean opens the Associated Press’s ENPS program buried on the system’s desktop. She scrolls through the AP wire alerts, double-clicking the script with the latest time stamp.
The seasoned journalist gasps when she reads the headline.
Chapter 15
Airline passengers stumble across the debris-covered freeway, collecting south of the ruins that carried them there. They are confused. Hollow. The lives they knew died somewhere up inside the tranquil clouds. Now, they stand on the brink of a hell they cannot comprehend.
The survivors cluster by a ring of what used to be vehicles. Fire inside their empty frames still burns upon the concrete, even as the rain continues down. Scraps of cars rest by blackened skeletons littering the interstate.
Devin looks questioningly toward a group of souls huddled around a blistered truck hood. A national news report teases in and out of reception from the battery-powered radio set on top. Clutching tightly to Terra, Devin quickens his pace and joins Isabel and Chris in the crowd.
Abd kneels next to them. His light blue Mariners jersey is soiled and gray with ash. He fumbles with strips of cloth scavenged from the remains, trying to tie a sling for his separated shoulder. He winces. Pain shoots down his left side whenever it moves. Abd struggles to grip the ends of the ripped cloth, but the fabric keeps slipping out of his good hand.
“Here,” Devin says, leaning down. “This may hurt some, bloke.”
The Arab’s black sockets shoot up with suspicion.
“It’s alright. I’m a firefighter. I help people,” Devin winks. “On my good days, that is.”
Abd’s eyes barely soften. Cautiously, more out of need than trust, he leans toward the redhead. The Arab grimaces as the tightened knot pulls the pieces of his shoulder back together.
“Most likely dislocated,” Devin says. The fireman works his fingers gently over the edges of Abd’s clavicle and ball joint. “Can’t fix you up proper, but this’ll hold you a bit.”
The daggers of pain slowly begin to subside. Not used to thanking strangers, Abd stiffly nods.
“Any word?” Devin asks, turning to the others.
Chris’s eyes refuse to leave the burnt truck hood. He just shakes his head, fearing to speak over the tinny sound echoing like prophecy from the small black radio.
The noise and hiss gradually begin to clear. Eager hands adjust the tuning dial, locking in on the only station still broadcasting. “…Reports are now coming in……mass destruction all across the U.S….”
Static and silence follow the words, chilling Devin to the bone.
The news anchor continues in a voice shaking with barely-restrained emotion. “We have…unconfirmed accounts of widespread damage……parts of New York state…Washington, D.C….and the West Coast…”
“No!” a middle-aged woman next to them cries out. A haunting look fills her eyes. “My kids…” she whimpers. Her legs buckle. Another survivor catches her, trying to give the woman what little comfort is left.
“The whole country?” someone asks behind Devin.
“ABC News has lost all contact…with bureaus in the affected areas… We’ll bring you any new information as it becomes available… It is unknown at this time…the extent of the damage or whether more cities have been attacked…”
* * *
RENTON, WASHINGTON - 10 MILES SOUTHEAST OF SEATTLE
Jacob Leder eases himself unsteadily down onto the couch. His grip tightens on the wooden armrest. Conducting a TV interview in the city just a few hours earlier, he shivers, looking up at the antique bronze clock on his wall. 10:04 A.M.
His young granddaughter, Sierra, gently pulls herself up into his lap. She looks with concern at her Papa’s normally cheerful face.
The only light inside Jacob’s militarily-precise Renton living room comes through the partially open blinds beside him. The power grid has probably been destroyed for hundreds of miles. In the distance, the blooming smoke of Seattle rises through the streaked glass. The cloud billows, turning the sky a burning and vibrant red.
Jacob takes his 5-year-old granddaughter’s hand. They turn the charging crank several times on the back of the wooden emergency radio and lean closer.
“The cause is still undetermined…” the static hisses. “But because of the scale of damage, at least in initial reports…the blasts were possibly nuclear in nature… It is believed that the President and most of Congress were in Washington, D.C. at the time of that city’s explosion…” The news anchor pauses, stunned even at his own words. “We do not yet know if there are any survivors…”
“Jesus,” Jacob whispers. His patriotic eyes fill. His jaw clenches.
* * *
NORTH BEND, WASHINGTON - 28 MILES EAST OF SEATTLE
Ruben Gonzalez looks down from the massive plume of black smoke spreading like locusts across the horizon. It shadows Seattle, far to the west. He runs into his dad’s quadruple-bay mechanic shop, joining the rest of its seven-person staff. They cluster around a radio resting on top of an open engine block. “Dad! The smoke…” Ruben shouts.
“Quiet!” Robert Gonzalez barks.
“One of ABC’s sources in the military reported earlier today that there’s been a dramatic increase in hostile chatter…” the radio continues. “That could indicate today’s actions were possibly a coordinated terrorist attack…”
“Was Mom on that plane?!” Ruben interrupts.
“I
don’t know, Ruben!” He closes his eyes, praying it wasn’t Isabel’s plane. Robert’s voice lowers to a whisper. “I don’t know.”
Through the windows of the door to the left of them, two customers stand in the waiting room. One of them stares out at the fading mushroom cloud above Seattle; the other flips through the channels of static on the television. The TV set finally finds a grainy image from Chicago’s Board of Trade.
* * *
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Hundreds of traders are uncharacteristically silent. They stand immobilized, staring at the ABC news anchor on the television wall filling one side of the CBOT. Stock names and numbers run along the massive leader board. Usually calculated hundreds of times every second, the numbers now crawl by unchanged as a government-mandated trading freeze takes effect.
“The blasts occurred simultaneously at approximately 9:20 A.M. Pacific time, 12:20 Eastern…” the anchor reads.
Towards the back of the room, murmurs begin rippling through the tense crowd of bond traders.
“Again, we haven’t received confirmation as of yet. But certainly, the concurrent nature of the explosions draws parallels to the terrorist events of recent years…” the news anchor continues. “If that is the case, there could also be more attacks to come…”
The words of change rip through a society that is, that was — that will never again be certain of its place in the world. Murmurs soon turn into a roar of voices. First one, then more traders turn and begin forcing their way back through the packed room toward the exits. The CBOT quickly turns into chaos, a stampede of civility trampling the bodies of the weak.
* * *
PORTLAND, OREGON
Yield Page 8