Sunfall (Book 1): Journey

by D. Gideon

  We all craned our heads around each other to look.

  The parking lot lights seemed to be pulsing… growing brighter, then back to normal, then growing even more bright. The light became almost painful to look at, and with a rapid-fire series of pops, the bulbs lining the parking lot blew out.

  Our reaction was a mixture of excitement and confusion. All around the campus, all of the other lights were doing the same thing… growing to a brilliant brightness, and then blowing out. A pole transformer across the street from the corner of our building started making a loud buzzing noise, electricity spouting out of it in a wild blue-white loop.

  “What the heck?” Josh had leaned so far out over the wall to see that I instinctively grabbed his belt to keep him from tipping over.

  “Don’t look at it!” Corey shouted above the tremendous buzzing of electricity as he scrambled off of the wall. “It’s arcing, like when someone’s welding. Don’t look!”

  “Someone could be hacking into the school’s power systems-” Marco started.

  With a loud bang and a blinding flash of light, the transformer exploded. Balls of blue-white light flew in all directions. I felt the rush of concussive force as we screamed and ducked down behind the retaining wall.

  More flashes of light lit up the sky around us, as more pole transformers around campus each buzzed with the sound of thousands of volts and then exploded. It couldn’t have just been the campus, either; there were dozens, even hundreds, of explosions going off. All around us, we could hear the screams of students in the buildings and those now running across campus. It sounded like we were in a war zone, and I clamped my hands over my ears and tried instinctively to make myself as small as possible.

  Todd was still looking over the wall, crouched down so that the only thing exposed was the top of his head and his eyes.

  “Look… LOOK!” He shouted, and we scrambled back up to peek over the wall and see where he was pointing.

  In the distance—it must have been very close to Washington D.C.—an enormous blue-white light was pulsing and getting larger. It was on the ground, not in the air, and a brief thought of panic flitted through my head.

  Have we been nuked?

  But this wasn’t the classic red and orange of a nuclear explosion I’d seen in movies; in the darkness, the blue-white light was almost a photo negative.

  With the thunderous sound of a bomb hitting its target, whatever it was exploded. The entire section of lights from buildings and houses to the left of it went dark—for more than a mile in that direction. Again, whatever had exploded lit up, and again the pulsing white-hot light grew bigger and bigger until there was another explosion. All of the lights to the right of it winked out.

  “There’s another one!” Josh cried, pointing back over the east side of the building.

  “That way! Look!” Corey shouted, grabbing at my shoulder and pointing to the north.

  All around us on the horizon and all through the city, identical displays of brilliant white lights were pulsing—and then almost as one, they were exploding. It sounded like dozens of bombs being dropped.

  Underneath it all were muffled booms, and the building seemed to lift up for a moment, then dropped, as if it were riding a wave. The five of us were thrown to the ground.

  I’ve read about survivors of disasters who claimed that time stopped, but I had never experienced it myself—until now. It was as if Life pressed the slow-motion button. I turned my head and could see individual locks of damp hair spinning around me. The explosions lit up the sky in a bizarre strobe light effect, and I had flashing images that will forever be burned into my memory.

  Flash.

  Todd, frozen as he scrambled up, looking as if he were just launching from the blocks in a 100-meter dash.

  Flash.

  Corey, in a push-up, head craned back to look up at me with wide eyes, blood frozen as it gushed out of his nose. His glasses were hanging off of one ear, twisted and broken.

  Flash.

  Marco, his body spread out covering Josh as if to protect him from falling debris. Marco stared out at the sky over the far retainer wall, his eyes squinting against the light.

  Flash.

  I felt pain in my palms and looked down, shocked to find that I, too, was already up and attempting to move; one knee still on the ground. The gravel from the walking path was digging into my hands. My hair swung down to block my vision and suddenly, just as quickly as it had started, it was over. Time switched back into normal.

  “Get inside! We need to get inside now!” Todd said, nearly yelling. He scurried over to Marco and started pulling him off of Josh.

  I couldn’t see anything well enough to tell if I was bleeding. Frantically I patted myself, feeling for wetness.

  “I think I’m okay,” I said. “Is everyone okay? Anything broken? Corey, I saw blood-”

  “I think a truck just hit my face,” Corey said. “Don’t move—my glasses fell off.” I could hear him shuffling his hands around in the gravel.

  “Got ‘em. Shit. I got part of them, at least.”

  I looked over and could see silhouettes wrestling to my left.

  “Marco? Josh? You guys okay?”

  “Ow! Stop! Todd, calm down!” Marco protested. He pushed Todd’s hands off and sat up. “I’m okay.”

  Josh hadn’t made a sound yet. I started to crawl in their direction.

  “Josh? Josh! Are you hurt?” Josh groaned, prompting me to crawl faster. “Josh?”

  “I’m here. Ow,” Josh groaned. “Marco, the next time you-” he stopped. “Crap. The back of my head’s wet,” he said. He sounded worried.

  “I’ll go get a flashlight,” Todd said, starting to stand up.

  “I’ve got one,” Josh and I said together. Up until that moment, I had completely forgotten I had one. I pulled my mini flashlight out of one of my pockets and clicked it on.

  “Don’t move,” I warned. “Let me check your pupils.” I tried to shine my flashlight in his eyes, while he tried to squint at me. His pupils were the same size, and reacting to the light.

  “Is this where I wag my tail?” Josh grinned and stuck his tongue out, mimicking panting. If he was teasing me about becoming a veterinarian instead of a doctor like him, he couldn’t be too hurt.

  “Only if you want me to prep you for a neutering,” I said. “Any dizziness? Numbness?”

  “Fingers and toes all working,” he said, serious again. “But I might have cut my head.”

  He pulled his hand away from the back of his head and we both blinked at it in surprise.

  “Or maybe I didn’t,” he said. His hand was wet, but not with blood. Josh rolled over, and I shone the light where he’d just been. There was a small rivulet of water flowing there, spreading out. I panned the light around and found the source—an overturned bucket sitting next to one of the flower beds.

  “Rip, shine that over here. See if you can find my other lens,” Corey said.

  I swung the light around and gasped. Behind me, Marco let out a sharp whistle.

  “You look like an extra in a zombie movie,” Marco said.

  He was right. Corey had blood all over him. His shirt was soaked, the hand over his nose was covered in it and steadily dripping onto his shorts and thighs.

  “That might be broken,” Josh said, scrambling up. “Put your head back and pinch your nose.”

  “Tried that,” Corey said. “Hurts too damn much.” He bent over, feeling around on the gravel in front of him.

  “Well at least tilt it back,” Josh said. A shadow passed by me and then Josh was in my flashlight’s beam, forcing Corey’s head back. A second later he had his own flashlight out, passing the beam over Corey’s eyes.

  “Watch where you step,” Corey warned. “That lens is here somewhere.”

  “I’ll look for it,” I said. I gingerly crawled back and started scanning the ground with my flashlight, looking for a reflection. I made three passes in every direction, but nothing glinted at me.<
br />
  “I can’t find it,” I said. Corey sighed, then yelped and covered his nose, slapping Josh’s hand away.

  “Get it later,” Todd said. “We need to get downstairs in case this isn’t over.”

  I could still hear buzzing, and in the distance, popping noises. Not as loud as it had been when the transformer across the street was about to blow, but it was a definitive sound in the background.

  “It’s not over,” Corey said, his voice slightly muffled from his hand over his nose. “Listen to that. Whatever that was, it’s still happening. It’s just that everything that could blow up, has blown up.”

  There were still frightened screams coming from below us, and from the two dorms nearby. I stood up slowly, ready to hit the ground again at any sign of another explosion, and looked over the wall.

  The power was out. Everywhere, for as far as I could see. No building lights, no street signs, no neon…even the flight lights on the Washington Monument had disappeared.

  The transformer across from our building was on fire, and looking over the side of the building, I could see the fire’s light being reflected back from the grass below. The explosion had blown out windows in our building. Some of the cars parked closest to the pole were missing their windows. Smoke hung heavy in the air, and the smell of burning plastic and the tingle of nearby electricity was overwhelming. The hair on my arms was standing straight up, and I felt as if I were covered in static.

  I turned and looked back towards College Park. The only light was from car headlights, and the orange tint of fire in dozens, if not hundreds, of spots. The rest of the city was simply blackness.

  “Corey, you’re the engineer,” I said. “What the hell just happened? What was all that?”

  “Transformers, I think,” Corey said, nose still pinched. I heard him step up beside me. “Not just the transformers on the poles—those were the little booms.”

  “There were little booms?” Marco said, incredulous. “It all sounded like freaking bombs to me.”

  “Yeah, but the other ones—those really big explosions off in the distance—those were the big transformers. The really, really big transformers, at the substations. They’re the ones that control the power grid. Something… something overloaded them, I think, and they blew up.”

  The green glow from Corey’s watch suddenly flicked on, looking abnormally bright in the absence of any other light. His broken glasses were perched on his nose; I could see now that on one side, a lens was missing and the arm was broken just past the hinge. The remaining lens had cracks in it that reflected his watch light, making it look as if a bright green spiderweb was etched across his eye.

  “8:19,” he mumbled to himself, his voice sounding a little amazed.

  “You mean like a bomb? Someone set off bombs to take out our power?” Todd asked.

  “No, not bombs—at least, I don’t think so. Not from the way the lights were blowing first, and all the voltage arcing on that line across the street.” Corey looked around for a moment, eyebrows furrowed in thought. “No, someone didn’t do this on purpose. It’s… it’s like everything just got overloaded at once. I don’t know. If it was bombs, they would’ve had to been remotely detonated to all go off at the same time. That whole mess only lasted about three minutes.”

  “Three minutes?” Marco asked. “That can’t be right. It felt like… like forever.”

  “What about the building? An earthquake? Could an earthquake do this?” Todd sounded as if he were ready to spring away at any moment.

  “I don’t know,” Corey said. “I think the transformers under the school blew up. We’ve got two underground substations here. One for Research Park, and one for the rest of campus.”

  “Guys,” Josh finally spoke.

  “Well whatever it was, we need to get off of this roof, now,” Todd said. “It can’t be safe up here, and I’ve got to get down and see if anyone’s hurt on my floor.”

  “Yeah,” Marco agreed. “Getting off the roof sounds good. I vote we get off the roof.”

  “Guys!” Josh interrupted. “Look at the sky.”

  We all looked up, and froze.

  The night sky was red, shot through with all the colors of the rainbow. Green waves hovered low over the horizon, blending to a beautiful rose pink above the city that deepened to a ruddy red overhead. Streaks of yellows and blues shot through vertically, slowly pulsing brighter and dimmer.

  “What the hell is that?” Todd breathed.

  ”I… I think it’s the Northern Lights,” Josh said.

  “What’s Northern Lights?” Marco asked.

  “Aren’t those supposed to be way up in Alaska? We shouldn’t see them in Maryland, should we?” Corey asked.

  “Not usually, no,” Josh said. “I think maybe… no. No, we’d have known. Someone would have warned us.” His voice trailed off, sounding mystified.

  “C’mon, Johnson. I need to know what we’re dealing with, and you’re the friggin’ genius Eagle Scout,” Todd said, not sounding angry, but commanding. “I’ve seen your Astronomy badge. Tell us what you’re thinking.”

  “Okay,” Josh said, looking around at us. “But it’s crazy. And keep in mind I could be wrong-”

  “Out with it, Josh,” Marco said.

  “Well, between the power just dying, and the Northern Lights showing up this far south…” He took a deep breath. “I think we’re getting hit with a CME,” he said quickly. “A big one.”

  “CME?” Marco repeated.

  “A coronal mass ejection,” Josh said.

  “A coro-what? English, Johnson,” Todd said.

  “I am speaking english,” Josh said, his voice frustrated. “It’s from a solar flare. Basically-” he looked back up at the sky and gestured with a sweep of his arm.

  “Basically the sun just dumped so much energy into our atmosphere that it fried all of the power lines,” he finished.

  Corey and I spoke at the same time.

  “Oh, shit.”

  CHAPTER 2

  F riday, August 31st

  Snow Hill, Maryland

  Dorothy Parker was just sprinkling the last of the bread crumbs on her summer squash casserole when the oven beeped to let her know it was pre-heated. Opening the door, she quickly put the casserole on the bottom rack, and then lifted the loaf pans from her large country kitchen table and slid those onto the top rack. Closing the oven, she picked up the little oven timer from the countertop and spun it just past thirty minutes, then turned it back. The electric oven had its own timer, but at 60 years old, she thought all of those buttons were just too much work when a simple twist timer would do.

  Dropping her utensils into the soapy water in the sink, she looked out of the kitchen window at the Miller’s house next door. Thomas, her eldest grandson, was house-sitting, and he’d be up soon to shower and then coming through her back door for food. Dinner had been moved back a couple hours now that the harvests were coming in, and Thomas had been working his seasonal night shift at the corn cannery.

  The transistor radio next to the sink was on, as usual; for years she’d been carrying that little thing around wherever she went. The AM talk show was featuring a guest who was ranting about the economy, speaking over the host in his frenzy.

  “Recovery? What recovery, James? The Federal Government is trillions of dollars in debt, the housing market is about to crash again, and the real unemployment numbers put us at over 30%!”

  “Mmhmm.” Dorothy nodded along, her small brown hands making quick work of the spoons, washing them off and then dipping them into a sink of clean water before laying them on a hand towel. She unplugged the sink and ran some water to rinse the suds down.

  “I think you’re being a little pessimistic, Mr. Schiff. The latest unemployment numbers show the national unemployment at a mere 7.9%…”

  “And you believe that? Let me ask you this: when the ‘official’ numbers of able-bodied, working-age people not in the work force is fully half of the American population, ho
w does that translate to ‘official’ numbers saying only 7.9% of them are unemployed? Where’s the other 42%, James?”

  A flicker caught Dorothy’s attention, and she looked up to see the light in the Miller’s guest room was turned on. She looked at the clock on the stove: 8:00PM.

  “Right on time,” she said with a smile, and set about filling the coffee maker. Thomas had worked a full shift at the firehouse earlier today, and while he did get to catch a few winks between ambulance calls, he’d need a full thermos of coffee to get him through the night.

  The radio host was trying his best to defend his position.

  “All I’m saying, Mr. Schiff, is that there has to be some part of the population that simply does not want to work. Studies show that in 35 states, the benefits from welfare, food stamps, Medicaid and other assistance programs would net a recipient over $35,000 in annual income. Here in Washington D.C., that number jumps to $50,000 a year. It’s over $60,000 a year in Hawaii. Why work, when you can sit at home and get paid?”

  “We need to move to Hawaii,” Dorothy mumbled to herself as the coffee machine started coughing and sputtering. Reminded of money, she cast an eye to the calendar hanging from the refrigerator door: August 31st. Just three days until her daughter’s military pay came through, and a portion of it would be direct-deposited into their joint bank account. Then again, Monday was Labor Day—a federal holiday. All federal payments would be delayed until Tuesday. Thomas’ paycheck from the town would be delayed, too. It was a good thing that he’d be getting cash tonight from the cannery; the end of the month was always tight.

  The hardware store that she’d worked at for the past five years had laid her off early this spring; between the health care increases and slowing sales, her boss couldn’t afford to keep on any employees. Touching the little cross around her neck, she said a prayer of thanks for the harvest she’d gotten from both her garden and the Miller’s. She’d been able to can quite a bit of it, and she and Thomas had been eating well. Tonight’s casserole had gone straight from the garden to the oven.