by H. G. Bells
Then there were those ones with the riot shields working their way into the hole that had been blown in the wall. Here was perhaps the greatest show of force I witnessed; there was a loud clap and a bright flash, and those guys with the riot shields dropped down to the ground screaming.
This was a time to see all sorts of previously secret weaponry. I’m sure a lot of it had never been tested on human beings before; this was an exciting opportunity for weapons developers, no doubt.
Mostly it was just the good ol’ fashioned bullets that did the trick. A few of the more flashy things the CDC used maybe saved some lives; after those guys with the riot shields got hit with that weird light like that, and no one knew what could have done it, a lot of the attackers fled.
Those that kept it up were dealt with more swiftly. Bodies started hitting the ground at regular intervals. Every five seconds maybe. Long enough that it was an obvious, deliberate pace, short enough to keep it urgent. It caused even more people to flee. No one that ran was fired upon, no one that held their hands up in surrender was harmed.
Except for one, who held his hands up and walked into the building.
“Bomb!” came the yell from inside.
Gunfire. A blast. The sound of a million pieces of debris flying out of the building. Screaming. Coughing. Shouting. Blood running in a thin trickle across the dusted ground, dribbling down the top step, onto the next, down the next and the next, a line of red falling away from the now silent CDC.
Anyone that was left on the steps was there because they couldn’t leave. I got footage of someone’s blown-open ribcage, their heart still beating, bubbles frothing on their lungs where the shrapnel had done its work on the soft spongy tissues.
Yes, it was graphic, and some of it might have been unnecessary, but I wanted to really drive it home, be really, really clear that it was a bad idea. Some of those screams were so horrible; you can’t un-see those images, can’t un-hear those terrible cries, in English, in words that sound like your own. It was real, and hammered home the message way harder than it needed to, to make sure.
It was fortunate I lived nearby one of the first buildings to be hit. Let me set up my cameras early, let me have a place to fall back to position as well, for after.
I think my footage did more to prevent further internet vigilantism than any stupid press release, any official statement. It may have also been the impetus for The Curfew that blanketed America.
Seeing those couple of Guy Fawkes masks, either blown apart or with a bullet hole in the forehead and splattered in blood, was a clear, direct message. Notice the grey matter spattered just behind them?
Do not try this. This doesn’t work. Your body is a fragile mass of meat, and you will end messily.
Very swiftly, the internet drew a line connecting me and the CDC. Said I must have known, and wasn’t it weird how I wasn’t hit? True, I walked away unscathed, but damn, it’s not like I was up close and in the shit for most of it. My camera had a great zoom, and I had two other stationaries set up to get master shots. Christ, I could have filmed it from the safety of my own home if those damn trees weren’t in the way.
But after it had quieted down, I was able to get some pretty awesome shots of the carnage. And yes, some of them could only be acquired from the inside. I think the CDC saw how it could have helped them. I wasn’t working for them, but I certainly wasn’t one of the ones lobbing Molotovs through their front door. And they saw what I was up to. So yeah, they let me get some footage from inside, and sent me on my way. Another in a series of smart moves.
I had to flee pretty soon after my video reached a million views (in only, what was it, four hours?). I knew they would come for me. They always do, when it’s something that bad. The amount of hell they can cause a person is not to be underestimated; when it was just words being lobbed around the response was insanely disproportionate to the offence. Now they had a real live witch to hunt in lieu of their scapegoat for the whole insomnia.
It’s all right though, I don’t even think I mind. At least I wasn’t home when they torched my house; I was hunted, but I think I saved a bunch of their stupid lives, so it’s okay. How many attacks fell through after my footage got into their brains, when they could hear those screams and imagine it was their own guts laying on the ground like that?
God, the internet is an asshole, but I’m glad I helped save them. Even as they were chasing me across the park when they finally found me, late into the Longest Day (god they were relentless) I was glad, glad I had played my part.
I didn’t stop being glad until they lit the blowtorch.
FIVE PASSENGERS, $50,000.00 CASH, DESTINATION: GARRY, INDIANA, USA PLEASE, WE HAVE TO GET HOME.
—Banner hanging in Los Angeles International Airport
Us night-shifters over at New Bangkok International were already pretty close. Panuwat, the guy who had the com to my left, would bring the coffees from the staff room every evening so we could start our shifts with a hot drink. He and I had started there at about the same time, and were at the same rung in the ladder of seniority. Nat, the older lady to my right, had been there forever, and would always say the same things to us throughout the day.
“Let’s get these planes in the air,” was the one to kick us off.
“Whelp, time for a little in-flight meal,” was to let us know she was going on her break.
“Back to the ol’ gyroscopic stabilizers,” or some variation on flight gear, when she rejoined us.
“See you gentlemen tomorrow,” in parting. Every day, Punawat and I could count on these four lines, or variations on them, to be heard. After a while, we made a game of keeping track of which ones. I made us Bingo cards, and we filled them in within a matter of days. I made new ones with words rarely used, and some of her standard gestures. She sometimes did a Fonzie slap on the dashboard and pointed at a plane she’d just cleared as it took off (old American shows have gained quite a following with some of the older generations in Thailand, and Nat was making her way through Happy Days after work). Punawat and I would exchange a smile and tick off things on our respective Bingo cards. It was good-natured fun.
I liked them both. We had each other’s backs. We learned each other’s jobs, too, when there was time.
“Keep the headset half on, half off,” said Nat, showing me her right ear, uncovered. “Then you can hear everything.”
We were the first ones to be affected. Work was either 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. or 1:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., depending on that week’s schedule. When it happened, Punawat, Nat, and I were on the 1:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. rotation. We’d get home around eleven in the morning, have our dinners, and got ready for bed with double curtains drawn, which would block out the light but was insufficient in keeping out the sound of children playing outside. We’d sleep our eight hours, get up, and have our evenings to do things before coming to work.
We knew right away something was wrong, even though the Eastern Hemisphere didn’t get their first night of insomnia until what was Day 1 for the West. Air traffic chatter was all over it. Our employee online hub was rapidly filling with nocturnal pilots and attendants trying to find someone to take their flights after missing their sleep during the day. Problems with passengers were all over the place, and things were going wrong in every department. With over fifty million people coming through each year, our city of an airport couldn’t just shut down. We were a hub for all of Southeast Asia. Everyone was told to do their jobs as normal.
For some reason, the night owls, the people who were used to working while most others were asleep, became like something out of myth. As if we were coping any better. We still needed our sleep; when we usually got it had nothing to do with how much we needed or how poorly we functioned without it.
But all of a sudden, it was “Punawat’ll do it, he’s used to the odd hours,” or “Nat, you don’t mind staying another hour do you? I can’t even see straight.” It seems off now, but then, we never even got a curfew like most of the
rest of the world’s governments decided to enact. How could we have been so pigheaded?
We would cast sideways glances at each other, worried at what we had become in the minds of the day-shifters, but we soldiered on and did our best to pick up the slack that they couldn’t. We should have been deliberately bad, should have screwed up, or flat out refused. But we didn’t. Our little team of three ended up becoming the gods of the air traffic control tower at Bangkok.
Our managers would fumble through their shifts and we’d point out their mistakes and try and keep everyone afloat.
It was only six days in when it became apparent that we had made a grave error. Not a specific error I mean, but the overall, big-picture one. The one where we rationalized the need for air traffic to keep operating.
Sure, getting people home to their families was great, but after a few days of those emergency flights, we should have called it. It was only a matter of time. And with tensions mounting quite close by, both on the border between India and Pakistan, and the huge kerfuffle shaping up in the Suez Canal, we should have known to bring things to a controlled stop. Instead of a consensual winding down, what we got instead was a great big slam into a brick wall. One that totaled us.
“Time for a little in-flight meal deal dool dowel,” said Nat. Our speech patterns were getting increasingly inane. I’ve translated it for you into something similar, but you get the idea. Rhymes that led nowhere, random words; our mouths were suddenly unlocked and our tired stupidity was leaking out of them.
“Roger, Roger,” said Punawat.
“What’s our vector, Victor?” I added. Nat wasn’t the only one that liked Hollywood’s offerings.
“Green shrimp by bear balls,” replied Nat.
I’m surprised we were still able to push buttons, let alone sit in our chairs and extrapolate flight paths and keep planes separate on their landings and approaches and all that jazz. Arai wah. Essential service, my ass. I started keeping a tally of things in the control tower; cups of coffee spilled, knees bashed on consoles, toes stubbed, minor meltdowns and memory lapses. Severe impairment transitioning into full-on signs of dementia.
Planes told to land at the same time before someone corrected them, multiple planes directed into the same runway, planes given all sorts of directions that didn’t get anyone killed, just worried.
There had been those little fuckups, sure, all over the place. And that one slightly larger fuckup in the United States that everyone chalked up to terrorism; we never found out if that plane crash was intentional or accidental. I’m sorry to say that what needed to happen was a big fuckup, and, well, Bangkok was the unfortunate sacrificial lamb. Not on purpose—kuay, I didn’t mean it like that, but, well, it had to happen somewhere. We were all out of our minds, and no one was really able to make that call. As long as we were putting planes in the air, and bringing them down A.O.K., we would keep right on doing just that.
The last day that there were civilian transport planes in the air, Nat, Punawat, and I were still at it, still keeping it together at Bangkok.
“Bat-cat-rat,” said Punawat to Nat. “What the hell is going on with your shoes?” he asked, pointing wildly at her feet, fingers rapid-firing stabs at the two mismatched shoes.
“Punawat-what-what, you’ve never seen two different shoes before? Gods laughing!” she said, smiling at the heavens. Somewhere behind us, someone dropped a glass and swore. Nothing new.
I saw her radar. I saw it. But I mean, like, the light bouncing off the console and reflecting color into my eyes, sure, it was making it to the receptors of my visual input systems, but there was a problem somewhere between them and my brain. The optic nerve couldn’t’ve been the error, because I knew what I was seeing. The disconnect was somewhere even further down the line, somewhere in the ability to extrapolate meaning from it. As it was, it was just two signals converging on one another. What they represented did not compute, as the cause-and-effect portion of my brain seemed to be malfunctioning.
What a Chinese military transport was doing landing at Bangkok, on a civilian strip, we may never know. It came in the wrong way, just as a Boeing 737 was taxiing for takeoff. Both were full. And I mean full; flights were getting scarcer, and the Boeing didn’t have an empty seat on it. All those people eager to get to Frankfurt and transfer over to the last leg of their flight.
So I saw the display, watched it even. Like some part of me knew what was happening, but I was unable to articulate it. Nat and Punawat were exchanging further banter about her shoes, and neither noticed that I was staring. My mouth started having a go at sounding the alarm, but all it did was open and close; no sound came out.
“Haha, Komsan’s a fish, fish Komsan, fish Komsan,” said Nat. I managed to point. Just as they collided, I pointed. Somehow they got it much faster than I had. They stood, looking out the window to the tarmac below, where the fireball erupted.
Some of us stared. I finally managed to scream.
Back into the earth it goes
—Graffiti near the rupture on the Kirkuk–Ceyhan Oil
Pipeline, Turkey
Iwas the strongest and doing the best, so I went to get help for my family. I had two children, a daughter and a son, my wife, her parents and one of her uncles, and my parents and one of my aunts with me on the farm. We were relatively okay there as things were getting worse and worse in the world, but when Jiaying started trying to climb up on the roof, I knew I had to see if there was anything that could help her. Seeing her up there was just about the most terrifying thing—her foot was scrabbling at the gutter and she’d very nearly found purchase before I scrambled after her and pulled her to the ground. She’d cried; it had hurt when she landed. Then she asked why I had pushed her down. She has no realization of her actions, which made a ball of anxiety start to churn in my gut, and a hot ball of anger form at my inability to affect my situation, my complete helplessness to keep her safe.
I packed a backpack and headed to the dam. If I could get across it, there was a pharmacy which would have things I could use to help my family.
The checkpoint to get across the dam would be a problem: they had been turning people away, and there had been fights as people were denied crossing. How they could have caused us such trouble over the simple act of crossing the dam during that terrible time made my blood boil. Was my country not better than that, than attacking the people instead of standing back so they could help themselves when no one else would? A heat rose up the back of my neck and drove me towards the guard post with a fight ready to erupt, every muscle clenched with the anger of being kept in that powerless terror.
Anger always finds a target.
As I neared the checkpoint with that heat spreading up my neck, down my arms into my fists, I clenched my best knife in my pocket. What good would a kitchen knife have done against their CS/LR rifles? I didn’t even think about that, just that it was somehow important that I also had a weapon. My fist tightened around the grip as I approached the crossing.
But I soon found that it had only taken a few days for order to break down—the checkpoint was empty, save for a single soldier who had not even seen my approach. I crossed freely and without showing any identification; the solitary guard didn’t even acknowledge me until I strode past him. I waved at him when he looked, and he blinked slowly, then gave a slow nod, which I took as the only sign I needed to pass. I let the grip on my knife in my pocket slacken with each step I took away from him, and I felt my anger begin to fade into something different as I left the lonely guard at his post. To be on your own on the dam while your country was dying, while your family needed you—what was that guard sacrificing to be there? What was he even doing there still, when it didn’t matter that he was there? Maybe it was his last sacrifice.
I tried to leave my melancholy on the dam, but it followed me when I made land on the other side.
I was hoping to find something at the pharmacy in Zigui, right on the Yangtze River, by the dam, when I saw the barge go by.
At first I thought it was just a normal cargo barge, but then I noticed there was no one on it. No people at all. And so near the dam?
I’m talking of course of The Three Gorges Dam, largest hydroelectric operation in the world.
Largest fucking Sword of Damocles in the world, more like.
I watched that barge pass by and knew something was up. My hindbrain was still functioning on some subconscious level that saw it, maybe saw some wiring or wondered what all those barrels were for, and knew something was about to happen. As the current floated it gently headlong towards the dam, thoughts of the pharmacy vanished from my addled brain and I could only watch the barge.
I think when I hit my head, either on the ground or from some flying debris, my short term memory didn’t make it into my long term, so I don’t remember a good twenty seconds right before the blast. I remember watching the barge, right before it got to the dam, thinking, That doesn’t seem right. And right after I regained consciousness, it was chaos—I woke from being knocked out—it must have only been a minute, maybe two—and saw the watershed emptying. All the water stored to be let out in a trickle, suddenly freed to go where it wanted. That much water moving that quickly terrified me in some deep inner place that I’d never felt before. It was like I got cold, just looking at the water rushing, emptying, sending a torrent of death to everywhere downstream. I got cold to my core. I never realized how big water is before.
I looked across the river to where my home was. It was safe from the water. But now, it was on the other side of the world. With the dam out, I had no way to cross.
Within a few hours the vast lake would be a stream—I figured maybe I could cross it once it had drained away. As it did so, I sat on the steps of the pharmacy while it killed all who lived beyond the mouth. That mouth that had once been sewn shut now lay as an open maw, twisted steel and jagged concrete the teeth which could now only open wider, never closing, spewing forth the cause of, at that point, the single greatest loss of life in human history. The record, as you know, didn’t stand for long, but on that day half a billion people were snuffed out as the stored watershed with the Yangtze behind it came crashing down.