by D. Gideon
“I’ll figure something out,” he said, pulling the backup I.C.O.E. binder out of the pack.
“You’re seriously going to cover up with that blanket?” Mel asked. “It’s broiling in here.”
“It doubles as a pillow,” I said. I stuffed the blanket and towel under one arm and fished around in my pocket for my flashlight. Feeling the crumpled notice, I pulled it out and tossed it on the table.
“If we need to start a fire on the way home, let’s use that stupid notice,” I said. Reaching back into my pocket, I found my flashlight. “Goodnight guys.”
Mel, brows furrowed, was reaching for the paper when I turned and left. King padded after me, nails barely clicking on the linoleum floor.
CHAPTER 25
M onday, September 3rd
College Park, Maryland
I finished tightening up the silcock just enough so that it would drip slowly into the large plastic tub I’d placed beneath it. I had already filled the tub over halfway, and now I just needed the water to drain slow and steady into the tub to offset evaporation in case the dogs and cats came back. King already had his big muzzle in it, making splashing noises as he drank.
I hung the silcock key off of my belt loop with the carabiner I’d tied to it. Many buildings that used a lot of water had tanks on the roof like this one, to guarantee steady pressure. A silcock would be placed outside of the building as a quick way to drain the tank if needed. Other buildings, such as fast food restaurants and gas stations that had landscaping to water, usually had a silcock on the outside of the building so that the employees could hook up garden hoses. I’d even seen a silcock on the side of the building at a rest stop on Route 50. There would still be water in the pipes running through all of those buildings, and on the way home I intended to take advantage of that as much as possible. $8 at Lowes had been a small price to pay at the time, and now the key was invaluable.
I looked over the small mountain of food Corey had helped me lay out on the pavement beneath the eaves. We had laid out three bags, cut them open down the middle, then laid another row of bags on top, cut them, and so on. As the dogs finished their way through the top layers, it would be easy for them to get to the food below. In total we’d stacked up 12 bags of food; all that had been downstairs. On top of the recycle dumpster we’d done the same thing with six bags of cat food, after pushing the dumpster up against the side of the building so it would be under the eaves as well. I didn’t have anything to shelter the food with, so I was hoping the eaves would keep the rain off.
Corey had gone back inside to find a bathroom and clean up. The last time I had looked, Mel was still sound asleep on the couch in the break room. I hadn’t seen Marco anywhere, so I assumed he was still asleep as well.
The sun was just starting to peek over the trees when King perked up his ears and gave a little huff. I heard the quiet hum of an engine and the scrabbling of tires turning on old asphalt. The sound was surprisingly loud in the morning quiet. Someone was parking their car in the small lot on the other side of the annex. After a moment, I heard a car door shut. Then it was silent again.
The annex’s lot was for county vehicles only. Even so, all of the dogcatchers still parked in this lot when they were on duty; it was just closer to our side of the building. The school board employees all parked here too; every morning there would be a stream of them taking a shortcut through the halls of the Animal Control Office rather than walk across the old basketball court in the baking sun to get to the School Board offices. This lot was empty now, the animal control officers having taken their trucks home.
Still, someone coming to the building startled me. After seeing the shape the impounded animals had been in when we arrived, and then reading the notice Marco found, I had assumed we’d have the entire place to ourselves this morning before we rolled out.
So much for assumptions.
I didn’t want to get caught letting the animals go and have to explain myself to anyone, or worse yet, get into an argument about whether or not they should all be put down. The notice had instructed everyone to stay at home until a supervisor contacted them. Was this person unaware of the notice, or had they been somehow told to come in by a supervisor? And if they’d been told, did that mean people in the Animal Control Offices had been told as well?
I had to find out, before someone from the ACO came in and found us all here.
Jogging up the back steps, I kicked out the door stopper and let the door shut behind me. When Corey and I had been bringing out the pet food, it had been easier to just wedge it open than enter my code into the pushbutton lock each time.
Stopping at the break room, which was still dark and quiet, I told King to stay. He lay down, putting his big head on his paws, and gave me a guilt trip look. I frowned, but ignored it, and continued on through the annex to the other side of the building.
I’d never been on this side before, so I was unfamiliar with the corridors. There was enough light coming through the windows of offices that I was able to see pretty well in the hallway. At a junction, I stopped and listened. Not hearing anything, I continued on. I did this repeatedly and came up with nothing by the time I got completely to the other side of the building. I’d have to take one of the side halls.
This side of the building was carpeted, and the decor had been updated recently. It made the ACO side look positively shabby, with its aging linoleum floors and paint that looked like it had been done twenty years ago. I went down two side halls with no luck, backtracking my steps so I wouldn’t get turned around. I even found a break room with two matching leather couches, three overstuffed armchairs, and both a soda and snack machine. There was no stove though; just a microwave on a cart next to a stainless-steel refrigerator. I made a mental note to myself to get Corey down here to see if he could crack into those machines and kept going. When I entered the third hallway, I saw light coming from a doorway at the end. As I got closer, I could hear the sound of file cabinet drawers being softly closed.
Sticking my head around the doorway for a peek, I saw a pretty woman who was probably in her late forties. She wore jeans and a nice blouse with sensible flats. Her light brown hair was pulled up into a loose bun, and she’d taken the time to put on makeup. It looked like she had dressed to come to work. I wondered if this was her office. If so, she must’ve been important. The side walls were lined with heavy wooden bookcases, and those were filled with thick books and plaques. Two expensive chairs that looked to be leather sat against the wall by the door, with a little table nestled between them. The filing cabinets were against the back wall of the office, and in the center of the room sat a massive desk. It was made of some type of dark wood and had a thick sheet of glass over the top to keep it from getting scratched up. There was a monitor, a keyboard, a blotter with a calendar, a brass light with a green glass shade, and a cellphone charging station. Between all of these was a messenger bag and a pop-up LED lamp that hurt to look at—that had been the light I’d seen coming out of the room. Looking up at the nameplate on the door, I read:
Prince Georges County School Board
Health Services Superintendent
Jack Rainer, M.D.
I could have been wrong, but she didn’t look too much like a “Jack” to me. She did look a bit familiar, though.
“C’mon, c’mon, where do you keep them, you perverted old S.O.B.?” She muttered to herself. Then she must’ve found what she was looking for. With a barely-whispered “YES!” she turned from the cabinets with a thick file folder in her hands.
“Hey,” I said, stepping into the doorway.
She squealed and dropped the file folder onto the desk, revealing a small stun gun in her right hand. Eyes wide, she held it out towards me, pushing the button and causing electricity to arc across its contacts.
“Stay back! I don’t have anything you want! I’ll hurt you!” She said, voice high.
I held my hands up. “Whoa, whoa, I don’t want anything from you. I’m Ripley, from ov
er in the Animal Control Offices? I just have a question.”
She stopped pressing the button but still held the gun towards me. “From ACO? Step in here a little bit so I can see you.”
I stepped in, still holding my hands up. The woman sighed and lowered the stun gun.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. I recognize you from over there. I pass you a couple times a week in the mornings when I’m coming in.” Then her eyes narrowed and she lifted the gun again. “Wait, what are you doing here? They told us all to not come in.”
I resisted the urge to tell her that I could ask her the same thing, and went for partial honesty.
“I’m an intern over at ACO. Studying for my vet degree. Things at the University were getting pretty scary, so I snuck out last night and came here. Figured I’d walk home once the curfew was up.”
“I can’t give you a ride home,” she said quickly. “Every drop of my gas is spoken for already.”
“No, no,” I assured her. I spoke quickly, so I’d sound nervous. That wasn’t too far from the truth, actually.
“I saw you come in and was just wondering if a supervisor had contacted you? Because I wanted to wash up and stuff before I go, but if someone from the ACO comes in and finds me hiding out when I’m not supposed to be here, I could lose my internship. I just wanted to know if I should hustle out of here, or if I still had some time.”
The woman gave a sarcastic laugh and set the stun gun onto the desk. “Honey, if you were going to stay in this building, you’d have all the time in the world. We’re not ever getting contacted to come back. What did you say your name was, again?”
I told her and she nodded, then began sliding papers back into the file folder. Some of them had slid off of the desk onto the floor, and she squatted down, feeling around for them with her hand while trying to keep an eye on me. Finally she’d gathered them all, stood, and shoved them into the folder.
“I’m Joyce. And I’m sorry to act like a mom—I can see you’re a capable young woman—but you really shouldn’t stay here long. You should get home as soon as you can.” She stuffed the file folder into her messenger bag.
“Why?” I asked, feigning ignorance.
“I don’t know what they’ve told you over at the University, but out here they’ve had police with loudspeakers telling us everything’s going to be fine and they’re working on turning the power back on. The power’s not ever coming back on. They know that, and they’re lying to us. Hell, they knew Friday morning that it was going to go out and never come back.”
“I know about the sun,” I admitted. “They’re not telling anyone anything over at the University. Some friends and I figured that much out. But why do you think they knew about it?”
Joyce looked at me for a minute, then dug around in her bag and pulled out a slim phone. She pressed a button on the side and it began to power up.
“Before I came to work here at the school board, I was a science teacher for twenty-five years,” she said, watching the screen. “Couldn’t take it anymore and looked into early retirement, but the pension wouldn’t have been enough. So I figured I’d put in five more years here and then I could get my full pension. At least here I wouldn’t have to deal with the curricula getting dumbed down any more, and spending five months getting the kids ready for a standardized test instead of actually teaching, right?”
“Makes sense,” I said, not sure where she was going with this.
She waved her hand at the phone as if that would make it boot up any faster. “Anyway, I’ve got lots of science apps on my phone still, from when I was teaching. A map of the constellations, an interactive periodic table app, that kind of thing. And I’m still signed up for alerts from all kinds of scientific websites. Here we go.”
She tapped on her phone a few times, and then looked up. “This is a text I got from SolarHam.com Friday morning. They pull alerts from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center and blast them out to subscribers,” she said, holding the phone out to me.
I stepped forward and took the phone. The message had stuff about a Space Weather Message Code, a K-index and a threshold reached, and something called a Synoptic Period. I didn’t understand any of that, but the first line after that section caught my eye: Active Warning: YES.
The next lines were more frightening.
Potential Impacts: Global.
Induced Currents - Severe power grid fluctuations will occur. Full grid failure expected.
Aurora - Aurora will be visible as far south as the equator.
I handed the phone back to her. “Any idea how strong it was?”
She dragged her finger over the phone and nodded. “SolarHam sent out another text right after that, saying it had blinded the solar observatory satellites, so it was at least an X-class with a level of 28, but based on the speed mentioned in the NOAA report, probably more like an X-60 or so. It was huge.”
She turned the phone towards me again, showing me another text. This one was in all caps. I scanned down it quickly, and goosebumps rose on my arms.
IT HAS HAPPENED. OUR GENERATION’S CARRINGTON IS COMING. X-CLASS OF 28+ JUST FRIED THE SATELLITES. BASED ON SPEED IN NOAA REPORT, LIKELY X-60+. THE GRID IS DONE FOR. YOU HAVE MAYBE 18 HOURS TO GET READY. MAYBE LESS. I’LL HAVE THE FINAL SDO AND LASCO IMAGES OF THE FLARE AND CME ON THE WEBSITE UNTIL THE POWER GOES OUT. SUGGEST YOU PRINT ONE OUT TO SHOW YOUR GRANDKIDS ONE DAY. THANKS FOR ALL OF THE SUPPORT OVER THE YEARS, AND BEST OF LUCK. MAY GOD BLESS YOU AND WATCH OVER YOU. SOLARHAM - OUT.
“Okay, so why didn’t everyone freak out?” I said. “Why wasn’t this all over the news?”
Joyce pulled the phone back and started tapping it again. “I was on the phone when the alert came in. Didn’t get a chance to look at it right away. When I did, maybe ten minutes later, I went to the website…and found this.”
She turned the phone around to show me a photograph of a computer screen. The webpage had a bright red border, a white background, and in the center were three seals: the Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the F.B.I.
Text under the seals read:
THIS WEB SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED
as part of a joint law enforcement operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Homeland Security Investigations in accordance with the Patriot Act for inciting terror and terrorist activity and a protective order obtained by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice.
This was followed by a long list of specific statute numbers and references, with an assurance at the bottom that the entire thing was legal thanks to the District Court for the Southern District of New York.
I looked up. “So either they tried to hide it, or it was a huge prank from the person running SolarHam.”
She waved a hand around. “Does this look like a prank to you? They knew about it, and they didn’t want anyone else knowing about it. They didn’t tell the public about it, and worse, they hid evidence of it from us.” She pressed a button on the side of the phone and it started to shut down.
“If that’s true, then what you have there could be really dangerous,” I said, pointing at the phone.
“Don’t I know it,” she said. “I’ve been working on a way to get screenshots out and spread as far as I can get them, but with all of this interference I haven’t had any luck yet.”
“How are you going to do that with no internet?”
She looked at me as if I’d grown two heads. “Digital pictures are just ones and zeroes, honey. You can bounce them around with radio waves just like you do any other kind of data. I just need the atmosphere to cooperate, and some other people with working antennas.”
I shook my head. “If some people knew about this, I just don’t see how they could’ve kept it quiet. It would have spread like wildfire on the internet.”
“Why do you think all the social media sites were down Friday?” She asked. “News stations saying they were all ge
tting DDOSed by Anonymous, and overloading internet bandwidth?”
I shrugged. “I was here and at the vet clinic all day Friday. One of my friends said Facebook had been up and down all day, but I don’t even have a cellphone.”
“Well, they were all down, from what I could tell. It did a really good job of silencing people. There might have been a few emails flying around, but nothing like what would have happened if someone had announced it on Twitter or Facebook.”
“Panic in the streets,” I said. She nodded.
“So, not to be nosy, but, if you knew this was coming, why didn’t you already get out of the city? Why are you here?” I asked.
She smiled. “Currency,” she said, patting her messenger bag. “A nice, fat list of currency and every school I need to go to to pick it up.”
“Money?” I said, surprised.
“Oh this is better than money. This will keep me comfortable for a long, long time.”
I furrowed my brows, but she shook her head and slung the messenger bag across her chest. With one hand she picked up the stun gun, and with the other she lifted the little LED lamp.
“Sorry, honey, but I don’t really know you. So you’re going to walk ahead of me all the way out of the building, and I’m getting in my car and leaving. I just can’t risk it, and I need to get going before that pervert Rainer remembers what he’s got in here and comes for it himself.”
“I don’t even know what it is that you have,” I said, backing up as she came around the desk.
“And I’d like to keep it that way,” she said. “No offense. Turn around and start walking.”
She followed me like that, a few feet behind me with her stun gun at the ready, directing me where to turn until we got to the exit. Once outside, we walked to her car and she stopped.
“You know the code to get back in, right? I’m not leaving you stranded out here or anything?” She collapsed the LED light and stuffed it into her messenger bag, then pulled her keys out of her pants pocket.