Sunfall (Book 1): Journey

by D. Gideon

  “You should’ve heard her, Rip,” Josh said. “Leandra was cussing up a storm. Said she’d been on 25-mile treks carrying fifty pounds of weight on her back, and there’s no way Stephanie would even last a mile dragging all that…crap… around.”

  “Did Stephanie try to kill her?” I asked.

  “She said she’d gotten it all here in her car and she was getting it all home in her car, but Leandra reminded her about the backups and stuff they saw last night and said there might be a good chance that if she left, she’d be walking.”

  “I should get Leandra to come up here and talk some sense into Mel,” I said, and ducked as Mel threw a pillow at me.

  The cafeteria was open for dinner as well, serving up the same breakfast items, cold sandwiches, cereals, salad, and fruit they’d had for lunch. There was a lot of grumbling about not having a “real” dinner, and one student I didn’t recognize caused a bit of a scene yelling at the cashier before the campus police showed up to calm him down.

  It didn’t seem as if anyone else was concerned about setting some food aside. They’d eat, throw their trash away, stack their trays on top of the trash cans and simply walk off. I had already grabbed two extra bowls of sugary dry cereal and dumped them into a ziplock baggie that I’d brought along with me. Corey and I were heading back from the line with a few bottles of unrefrigerated juice to take with us when a group that had gathered around a table in the corner started getting loud.

  “That’s ridiculous! The power is coming back on!” a shrill voice said.

  Corey and I glanced at each other and made a beeline for the crowd. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Josh heading that way also, while Marco and Mel were gathering up the extra food we’d already taken to the table and were stuffing it into his oversized messenger bag.

  The crowd was gathered around a table where an older man with square-framed glasses was sitting next to two National Guardsmen. The man was shaking his head and arguing in a low voice with one of the soldiers, while the other sat looking nervously at the crowd.

  The soldiers had cleaned their plates, but the older gentleman had barely picked at his food. I noticed a few saran-wrapped sandwiches sitting to the side of his tray—apparently we weren’t the only ones thinking ahead.

  “That’s one of the science professors,” Josh said as he bumped up against me. “I recognize him from seeing him in the halls over in the Science building, but I don’t know his name.”

  “They need to know,” the professor was saying. “You might have me here against my will doing this work for you, but I still have free speech and by God I’m going to use it.”

  “It could start a panic, sir,” the soldier arguing with him said.

  “Good!” The professor said, banging his fist on the table. “Then maybe they’ll get the hell out of here while there’s still time!”

  “Professor Williams, what do you mean the power’s never coming back on?” Another student asked, leaning on the opposite edge of the table.

  The professor looked up and his eyes widened when he saw how much the crowd had grown. Adjusting his glasses, he sat up a little straighter.

  “Very early yesterday morning, the sun produced a solar flare. This solar flare, in turn, produced a massive X-class coronal mass ejection. This ejection, known as a CME, reached an intensity of X-28 before our satellite equipment was blinded. We have reason to believe it was much stronger.”

  He paused, looking over the crowd. I looked, too. From the expressions on their faces, it was clear that only a few had any idea of what he was talking about.

  “At first, we believed that the Earth would rotate past the oncoming CME in time to miss it. We were watching it closely in the Astrophysics department, and conferring with the Governor. We tried to get him to issue an emergency alert, but…” He shook his head and huffed, glancing at the soldiers next to him.

  “Normally, it takes three to four days for a CME to reach Earth’s orbit. However, our models and projections, based on the data we received before NASA’s satellite was blinded, were incorrect. It was moving much faster than we anticipated. Just after 8:00pm last night, Earth entered the CME cloud. It was traveling so quickly, it reached us in just over 18 hours.”

  A small dark girl with a frizzy poof of a ponytail held up her hand. “Wait, so you’re saying the power’s out because of the sun?”

  “Yes. An ejection from the sun has made a direct impact with the Earth,” Professor Williams said, nodding.

  “Bullshit,” a deep voice said. Its owner was tall and broad; I recognized him as one of the football players Todd had wrangled into getting clean-up materials last night.

  Professor Williams’s eyes opened wide, and with a slightly feral look he addressed the student directly.

  “What’s your name, son? I haven’t seen you in one of my classes.”

  “Jeff Stafford,” the big guy said. “And I don’t take your classes.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Stafford. Now, would you please explain what part of my explanation was ‘bullshit’?”

  “The whole thing. We’re college students, bro. You think we don’t know the sun is round?”

  “On the contrary, I assumed you knew that, Mr. Stafford. What does that have to do with my statement?”

  Jeff looked around at the crowd, and seeing that he had all of the attention, puffed up a little.

  “I’ve been shooting ever since I was big enough to hold a gun, and I shoot competition rifle now,” he said. “When you’re making extreme long-distance shots, you have to account for the curve of the earth, and for the earth turning. While the bullet is in the air on its way to the target, the earth is still turning underneath of it.”

  Jeff had uncrossed his arms, and was using his hands to illustrate as he talked.

  “That affects your shot; it could cause you to miss if you didn’t account for it. Fire a bullet straight into the air, and it won’t come down in the exact same spot, because while it was up there, the earth turned underneath of it. It’ll come down a little off to the side,” he said.

  “I agree,” Professor Williams said, nodding. “Please get to the point.”

  “Well, if I stand here and fire a shot into the air, it would go up in a straight line. If you stood a couple miles away and fired a shot into the air, it would go up in a straight line, too. But to someone who was watching those bullets from a ways off, it wouldn’t look like we both shot straight into the air—it would look like we shot off in a V,” he said, demonstrating his hands rising up and spreading away from each other.

  “It’s because the earth is curved, and so is the sun,” he said. “Just the difference of a couple of miles changes the trajectory; the angle of the shot. For the sun to fire something off at us and have it hit us, it would have to be in the exact perfect spot aimed at the exact perfect angle so that when it traveled in a straight line, by the time the bullet got to us, we’d be lined up for it.”

  He looked around at everyone again, shrugging.

  “The odds of that happening are hundreds of trillions to one,” he said. “It’s bullshit.”

  “But it’s not a bullet,” Josh said, then turned beet red as all of the eyes turned to look at him.

  Professor Williams’ head snapped over to us, and he raised his eyebrows when he saw Josh.

  “That’s an excellent point, Mr…?”

  “Johnson, Sir,” Josh said. “Josh Johnson.”

  “Mr. Johnson, can you explain why that’s important?” Professor Williams asked.

  Josh nodded, and taking a deep breath, he turned to look at Jeff. Corey scooted back out of his way.

  “You’re right,” he said to Jeff. “If it were a bullet, it would be nearly impossible for all of those things to line up so perfectly. But it’s not a bullet. It’s not even a laser beam. A CME spreads out in a cone and gets bigger as it travels. Like a flashlight beam.”

  Jeff’s arms were crossed again; his eyebrows furrowed. Josh looked back at Professor Williams, and
he gave a short nod for him to continue. Josh turned back to Jeff and held his hands up.

  “Okay, think of it like this. My head is the sun. If you were holding up a raisin, and moving it really slowly-” he passed his hand from right to left as he talked “-that would be like the Earth rotating around the sun, right?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Jeff said, his voice sounding disgusted. “What’s your point?”

  “Well, if I tried to spit a BB pellet at the raisin, I’d probably miss. The raisin is too small, and it’s moving, and I might not have the right angle. But, if I sneezed…”

  Josh mimicked a sneeze coming out of his mouth, spreading his arms wide.

  “My sneeze would spread out in a cone and be big enough to hit that raisin, and you, and everything around you. That’s what the CME does. It spreads out and becomes a cloud; like a sneeze,” Josh finished, his arms wide.

  There were a number of chuckles and some low muttering. Jeff rolled his eyes and shook his head. “You’re saying the sun friggin’ sneezed on us?” he said.

  “That’s exactly right,” Professor Williams said loudly, calling attention to himself again. “The ejection spreads out and becomes a cloud of energy. Now, it does take a bit of luck to get the angle right, as Mr. Stafford noted, but it simply needs to be aimed in our general direction. It doesn’t have to be precise.”

  He looked back at Josh and smiled again, but this time his smile was warmer.

  “Excellent job, Mr. Johnson,” He said. “A sneeze. I’ll remember that.” Next to the Professor, the soldier who had argued with him was shaking his head and looking at his watch.

  “So now you know what happened. The sun ejected a cloud of energy at us, and that cloud hit us directly. There are details involved with magnetic fields and currents, but I’m not going to go into that. Suffice to say that the energy from the cloud has overloaded our power grid and knocked it offline,” Professor Williams said. “And, unfortunately, it’s going to be a long, long time before we’ll be able to get it back.”

  “So, what, like six weeks or something?” A girl asked.

  “Try six years, dear—at the soonest. More like ten, or longer,” the professor said.

  “Oh this is bullshit,” Jeff said again. “I’m outta here.” He turned and pushed his way through the crowd, but stopped once he got to the cafeteria doors. “Hey guys,“ he said loudly. “Phi Kappa’s having a Blackout Pool Party all day tomorrow! Swimsuits required, but only until dark! We’ll provide the ATF, you provide the T&A!”

  A collective cheer went up and smatters of applause. The crowd around Professor Williams thinned as more students broke off and headed for the exits, laughing about the “old man” and how he was “so crazy he needs guards.”

  “ATF? Isn’t that a federal agency?” Marco asked, coming up beside us.

  “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fire—usually burn barrels, but they’ll probably go all-out and have a bonfire this time,” I said. “The campus police are too busy to stop them with everything that’s going on.”

  “Their version of tobacco isn’t the legal kind, either,” Corey said.

  “Young lady, I was on the EMP Commission for Congress,” Professor Williams was saying to the girl who had guessed the power would be out for six weeks. She’d continued to argue with him through the breakup of the crowd. “I helped write the Executive Summary. It doesn’t matter whether it’s cyber-attack, terrorists with bombs, an EMP or a CME; it all ends the same way. The power goes out, and it stays out. The water stops pumping, the sewage plants stop working, the natural gas loses pressure eventually, and the trucks stop delivering food to the grocery stores and picking up the trash.”

  “But…but if all that happened, people would die,” she said. “The government would never let that happen. They’d do something.”

  Professor Williams barked a sarcastic laugh. “You mean like these government gentlemen right here?” He waved a hand at the soldiers, who had stood and were conferring with each other by one of the large cafeteria windows not far from the table. One of them was speaking into a walkie-talkie, holding it up to his ear to hear the response, and frowning. He shook it and tried speaking again.

  “Do you see them bringing in water, or setting up generators for you? Do you see them doing anything for you? ” The professor asked.

  “They’re protecting us,” the girl said. “One of my friends who was out last night said there’s almost rioting going on out there, and the Guard isn’t letting those people onto campus.”

  Professor Williams let out a long, tired sigh. “What is your name, child?” He asked, but his tone wasn’t barbed like it had been with Jeff. It was soft, and sad.

  “Cheryl,” the girl said, sitting down opposite the professor.

  “Cheryl,” the professor said, leaning forward a little. “The University does a lot of hush-hush research for the government. Everyone knows that; the University uses the fact as one of their biggest selling points. It’s all over the website. The Dean brags about it to The Baltimore Sun every chance he gets.” He reached over and laid a hand on top of Cheryl’s.

  “These men aren’t here to protect you. They’re here to remove the government’s top-secret research projects from the campus and move them to somewhere safe.”

  “Sir, you said you were here against your will,” Josh said. “What did you mean?”

  “I run one of those projects,” the professor said. “These gentlemen showed up at my doorstep last night and demanded that I come with them immediately. Scared my wife to death. I’m overseeing the dismantling of— well, the project. We’ve been going non-stop since about 9:00 last night.”

  “So they’re forcing you to do this?” Josh asked. “You can’t leave?”

  “I can’t leave until everything’s packed up, or so I’ve been told. We’ll see what happens then.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say that I don’t trust the government to let their top researcher on…this project…to go toddling back off into the College Park suburbs,” Professor Williams said, glancing back over his shoulder. “I designed and built the damn thing, and I’m the only person who can insure they put it back together correctly when they get it to wherever it is they’re taking it.”

  “They can’t force you to do this,” Corey said. “That’s slavery.”

  “Oh my dear boy, if only that were true,” the professor said. “They can, and they have. They stood on my porch last night and read me the exact authority they have to do it. It was Executive Order 13603; the section on consultants.”

  We all just stared at him and he sighed again. “I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “Janet was behind me crying, and my dog was going crazy. Just something about they can employ me-“ he said this with a sneer and held up a finger, “without compensation, in times of emergency. Look it up in the Law Library.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “Well that’s the question, isn’t it? For as long as they need me, I guess. Who knows how long that will be?” He shoved his tray a little. “The only reason they even let me come here to eat is because they mis-calculated and one of the pieces of my project won’t fit on their trucks. We can’t disassemble the rest of it until this part comes down, so we’re waiting for them to procure-“ he made air quotes, “a truck large enough for it.”

  We all looked over at the soldiers, who were still attempting to confer with someone on the other end of their radio and grabbing quick, nervous glances at the sky. The sun was getting lower, and as it dropped, the colors of the Northern Lights grew more vivid.

  “I still don’t get it,” Cheryl said. “If they’re here to move stuff, what happens when they leave? Will some of them stay? I mean, the University of Maryland is owned by the state, so it’s government property. They’ve got to stay and protect us, right?”

  “No,” Professor Williams said. “The instant they’re finished packing up each of the different projects, they’re leaving. A
ll of them. Those guards that have been holding the city back? They’ll be gone, and the city will come rushing in to get the food and water they think the Guard gave to the rich college students. It will be like locusts on a field.”

  A shiver went down my spine. A warm hand slipped around mine, and I looked up to see Corey giving me a concerned look. He squeezed my hand and nodded. He knew what I was thinking.

  “But…but then what are we supposed to do?” Cheryl asked, eyes wide.

  “You leave,” I said. “You go home, get your family, get all the food you have, and you head somewhere safe. Somewhere away from cities.”

  Professor Williams nodded, and blew a deep breath out of his nose.

  “This is my fault. When we wrote that Executive Report for the EMP commission, we recommended that the Stafford Act be changed to allow the government to seize private stockpiles of food and redistribute them fairly. I just never thought they’d take it further and seize private citizens, too.”

  I snorted. “I’ve read that report. I saw where the Commission told the government they should do that. You opened up the door for the government to seize private gardens, go into people’s homes and take their food, even take over grocery stores and farmer’s markets. You told them to do that, and executive order by executive order, they did that and more. Now the government has seized you for however long they want? I’m sorry, Professor, but I call that karma.”

  Professor Williams glared at me. “If ten people are starving and one person has enough food to feed twenty, it’s only fair that that food be redistributed-“

  “Have you prepped at all?” I asked. “Did you look at that 90% population die-off rate for the first year that you guys predicted and stock up some extra food so you and your wife wouldn’t be one of the casualties?”