One Second After

by William R. Forstchen

  But the area code was 703… and John recognized the next three numbers… the Pentagon.

  He opened the phone and clicked it on.

  “Hey, Bob.”

  “John, how you doing? Where’s my goddaughter?” He said it doing a halfway decent imitation of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone.

  Bob Scales, now three stars, John’s former boss at Carlisle and a damn good friend, had stood as Jennifer’s godfather, and though Irish Catholic rather than Italian, he took the job seriously. He and his wife, Barbara, usually came down three or four times a year. When Mary died they had taken a couple of weeks off and stayed to help. They never had children and thus they considered Jennifer and Elizabeth to be their surrogates.

  “Growing up,” John said sadly. “Her grandmother gave her a gold necklace that must of cost a grand or more, which counted a helluva lot more than the Beanies, and the stack of Pokemon cards still waiting inside. I even got tickets to Disney World for once school lets out that I’ll give her at dinner, but I wonder now if it will be the same.”

  “You mean when you took her there when she was six and Elizabeth ten? Hell, yeah, it will be different, but you’ll still see the little girl come out down there, even with Elizabeth. How’s Elizabeth doing, by the way?

  “I’m thinking of shooting her boyfriend later today.” Bob roared with laughter.

  “Maybe it’s best I didn’t have daughters,” Bob finally replied. “Sons, yeah…”

  His voice trailed off for a moment. “Hey, let me speak to Jennifer, ok?”

  “Sure.”

  * * *

  John walked into the house, shouting for Jennifer, who came dashing out of her bedroom, still wearing that damn necklace, and grabbed the phone. “Hi, Uncle Bob!” John tapped her on the shoulder. “You take your insulin?” he asked.

  She nodded her head; then chattering away, she walked around the house. John looked out the window across the valley to the mountains beyond. It was a beautiful, pristine spring day. And his mood began to lighten. Several of Jennifer’s friends would be over soon for a small party. He’d cook up some burgers on the grill out on the side deck; the kids would then retreat to Jennifer’s room. He had just opened the pool in the backyard over the weekend, and though the water was a chilly sixty-eight, a couple of the kids might jump in.

  He’d flush them out around dark, go to his Roundtable meeting, and maybe later this evening he’d dig back into that article he was committed to for the Civil War Journal about Lee versus Grant as a strategic commander… a no-brainer but still an extra five hundred bucks when done and another vita builder for tenure review next year. He could stay up late; his first lecture wasn’t until eleven in the morning tomorrow.

  “Dad, Uncle Bob wants you!”

  Jennifer came out of her bedroom, holding up the phone. John took it, gave her a quick peck on the top of her head and a playful swat as she ran back off. Seconds later the damn stereo in her room doubled in sound.

  “Yeah, Bob?”

  “John, I gotta run.”

  He could sense some tension in Bob’s voice. He could hear some voices in the background… shouting. It was hard to tell, though; Jennifer’s stereo was blaring.

  “Sure, Bob. Will you be down next month?”

  “Look, John, something’s up. Got a problem here. I gotta—”

  The phone went dead.

  At that same instant, the ceiling fan began to slowly wind down, the stereo in Jennifer’s room shut down, and looking over to his side alcove office he saw the computer screen saver disappear, the green light of the on button on the nineteen-inch monitor disappearing. There was a chirping beep, the signal that the home security and fire alarm system was off-line; then that went silent as well.

  “Bob?”

  Silence on the other end. John snapped the phone shut.

  Damn, power failure.

  “Dad?”

  It was Jennifer.

  “My CD player died.”

  “Yeah, honey.” Thank God, he thought silently. “Power failure.”

  She looked at him, a bit crestfallen, as if he were somehow responsible or could snap his finger to make the CD player come back on. Actually, if he could permanently arrange for that damn player to die, he would be tempted to do it.

  “What about my party? Pat just gave me a CD and I wanted to play it.”

  “No worry, sweetie. Let me call the power company. Most likely a blown transformer.”

  He picked up the landline phone… silence, no dial tone.

  Last time that happened some drunk had rammed into a telephone pole down at the bottom of the hill and wiped everything out. The drunk of course had walked away from it.

  Cell phone. John opened it back up, started to punch numbers… nothing.

  Damn.

  Cell phone was dead. He put it down on the kitchen table.

  Puzzling. The battery in his phone must have gone out just as Bob clicked off. Hell, without electricity John couldn’t charge it back up to call the power company.

  He looked over at Jennifer, who stared at him expectantly, as if he would now resolve things.

  “No problem at all, kid. They’ll be on it, and besides, it’s a beautiful day; you don’t need to be listening to that garbage anyhow. Why can’t you like Mozart or Debussy the way Pat here does?”

  Pat looked at him uncomfortably and he realized he had committed one of the mortal sins of parenting; never compare your daughter to one of her buddies.

  “Go on outside; give the dogs a run. They’ll have the power back by dinnertime.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  DAY 1, 6:00 P.M.

  Flipping the four burgers on the grill, two for himself, one each for Jennifer and Pat, he looked over his shoulder and watched as the girls played tag with the dogs in the upper field behind his house. It was a beautiful sight, late afternoon sun, the eight apple trees in full blossom, the girls laughing as they dodged back and forth. Ginger, the younger and crazier of the two goldens, knocked Jennifer over with a flying leap as she tried to hold a Frisbee out of her reach, and there were more squeals as the two dogs and two girls piled on each other.

  Months ago he had stopped wearing a wristwatch; the cell phone was now his timepiece. He looked through the kitchen window to the grandfather clock; it was just about six. The other kids should have been here by now; the agreement was they could come over for a brief party, but as it was a school night, the party would be over by 7:30. No one had shown yet. For that matter, he thought Jen would have been back long ago.

  He lit a cigarette, puffing quickly—it was amazing how annoying a twelve-year-old could be when it came to a “quit smoking, Dad” campaign—and tossed the half-smoked Camel over the patio railing.

  Burgers done, he set them on the patio table, went in, opened the fridge, pulled out the cake, and set it on the table, sticking twelve candles in.

  Back out again to the deck.

  “Dinner!”

  The dogs responded long before the girls, racing out of the field, circled

  the table, and then sat at their usual begging positions. Pat and Jennifer came out of the field.

  “Hey, Dad, something strange.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Listen.”

  He stood there silent for a moment. It was a quiet spring evening, silent except for a few birds chirping, the distant bark of a dog… rather nice, actually.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s it, Dad. There’s no traffic noise from the interstate.”

  He turned and faced towards the road. It was concealed by the trees… but she was right; there was absolute silence. When he had first purchased the house, that had been one disappointment he had not thought of while inspecting it but was aware of the first night in, the rumble of traffic from the interstate a half mile away. The only time it fell silent was in the winter during a snowstorm or an accident.

  “An accident must of shut it down,” he replied.

  I
t was common enough, the long winding climb up from Old Fort; every month or two a truck would lose its brakes and roll or old folks in a forty-foot-long land yacht would lose it on the twisting turns as the highway zigzagged out of the mountains and down to the Piedmont. One such accident, a hazmat spill with a truck rolling over, had shut down traffic in both directions for over a day.

  “Mr. Matherson. That’s what we thought, but it’s weird down there. No traffic jam, just cars stopped all over the place. You can see it from atop the hill.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that, Daddy. A bunch of cars, a lot on the side of the road, some in the middle, but no jam up, just everyone stopped.”

  He half-listened, while shoveling the burgers onto buns and putting them on the girls’ plates.

  “Most likely the accident’s further on and people were told to pull over and wait,” he said.

  The girls nodded and dug in. He ate his first burger in silence, saying nothing, just listening. It was almost eerie. You figure you’d hear something, a police siren if there was indeed an accident, cars down on old Highway 70 should still be passing by. Usually if the interstate was closed, emergency vehicles would use 70 to access the highway and it would be jammed with people trying to bypass the interstate. At the very least this was the time of night the darn Jefferson kids, up at the top of the hill, would start tearing around into the forest with their damn four-wheelers.

  And then he looked up. He felt a bit of a chill.

  This time of day any high-flying jets would be pulling contrails, and directly overhead was an approach corridor to Atlanta for most flights coming out of the northeast. At any given time there’d be two or three planes visible. Now the sky was sparkling blue, not a trace of a contrail.

  The chill… it reminded him of 9/11. How quiet it was that afternoon, everyone home, watching their televisions, and the sky overhead empty of planes.

  He stood up, walked to the edge of the railing, shaded his eyes against the late afternoon sun. Up towards Craggy Dome there was a fire burning, smoke rising vertical, half a dozen acres from the look of it. Another fire raged much farther out on the distant ridge of the Smokies.

  In the village of Black Mountain, nothing seemed to be moving. Usually, before the trees filled in completely, he could see the red and green of the traffic light at the intersection of State and Main. It was off, not even blinking.

  He looked back at the grandfather clock. It was usually this time of day that the “million-dollar train” came through, so named because it hauled over a million dollars’ worth of coal, mined out of Kentucky for the power plants down near Charlotte. When the girls were younger, an after-dinner ritual was to drive down to the tracks and wave to the engineer as the five heavy diesel-electric locomotives, thundering with power, pulled their load and crawled towards the Swannanoa Gap tunnel.

  The silence was interrupted by a throaty growl as Grandma Jen came up l he driveway in her monster, the Edsel.

  She pulled in beside his Talon, got out, and walked up.

  “Damnedest thing,” she announced. “Power’s out up at the nursing home. And you should see the interstate, cars just sitting all over the place, not moving.”

  “The power at the nursing home?” John asked. “What about the backup generator? That’s supposed to automatically kick in.”

  “Well, the lights went out in the nursing home. I mean completely out.”

  “They’re supposed to have emergency generation. That’s required,” John said.

  “Never kicked on. Someone said there must be a broken relay and they’d get an electrician in. But still, it’s a worry. They had to shift patients on oxygen to bottled air, since the pumps in each room shut off. Tyler’s feeding tube pump shut off as well.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He was nearly done with the feeding anyhow, so no bother. They said he’d be ok. So I go out to the parking lot and all the five o’clock shift of nurses and staff were out there, all of them turning keys, and nothing starting… but that old baby, the one you call the monster, just purred to life. Had to be here for my little girl, and that monster, as you call it, worked as it always has.”

  She nodded back proudly to her Edsel.

  “Can we go for a ride and see everything, Grandma?” Jennifer asked.

  “What about your party?” John asked.

  “No one else showed up,” Jennifer said sadly.

  Grandma Jen leaned over and kissed her on the top of the head.

  “Lord’s sake, child, you’re a mess.”

  “They were up playing in the field.”

  “And wearing your necklace when doing that?” Jen asked, horrified.

  John grimaced and realized he should have made sure Jennifer had taken it off before running around with the dogs. If she had lost it or it got broken in the roughhousing with the dogs, there’d have been hell to pay.

  “A burger, Jen?” he asked quickly to distract her.

  She shook her head.

  “Not hungry.”

  “At least some cake.”

  “Ok.”

  He went back into the kitchen and lit the twelve candles on the cake, a special one of course, no sugar, and brought it out singing “Happy Birthday,” Pat and Jen joining in.

  The other gifts were now opened, a card from Bob and Barbara Scales with a gift certificate for a hundred bucks for Amazon, the Beanies he had carried over from the wall and lined up on the table. Jennifer tucked Patriot Bear under her arm and opened the huge envelope, half as big as herself, that John had made up the night before, a collage of photos of Disney

  World with a fake “Ticket for Jennifer, Daddy, and, oh yeah, Elizabeth” printed in the middle.

  It was indeed a hit and now it was his turn to say, “Hey, don’t squeeze so hard; you’ll break my neck.”

  Finally it was over, past seven, and Pat started down the hill. Jennifer and the dogs walked her home.

  “Guess there’s no Roundtable meeting tonight,” John said, looking back towards town, as Jen helped him load up the dishwasher, even though they couldn’t turn it on.

  “What do you think is going on?” Jen asked, and he could hear a touch of nervousness in her voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “John, it kind of reminds me of nine-eleven. The silence. But we still had electricity then; we could see the news. All those cars stalled.”

  He didn’t say anything. There was a thought, but it was too disturbing to contemplate right now. He wanted to believe that it was just a weird combination of coincidences, a power failure that might be regional, and would ground most flights due to air traffic control. Maybe it was some sort of severe solar storm, potent enough to trigger a massive short circuit; a similar event had happened up in Canada several years ago.

  A thought hit him.

  “Your monster, let’s go turn it on.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They went out to the car, John slid into the passenger seat, and she turned the key over, and the car instantly roared to life. The sound, even after but a couple of hours of silence, was reassuring.

  He turned on the radio. It really was one of the old ones. With dials to turn, no buttons to push, the slightly yellowed face even had the two small triangles on them marking the frequency of the old Civil Defense broadcast frequencies.

  Static, nothing but static from one end of the dial to the other. It was getting towards twilight, usually the time the FCC had most AM stations power down, but the big ones, the ones with enough bucks to pay for the license, should be powering up now to fifty thousand watts, and reaching halfway across the country if the atmospherics were right.

  He could remember as a kid making the long drive from Jersey down to

  Duke in his old battered 1969 Bug, killing the time by slowly turning the dial, picking up WGN in Chicago—that strange country and western station out of Wheeling, so alien sounding with its laments about pickup
trucks and women—and throughout the night, if the atmospherics were just right, WOR out of New York, catching his favorite, Jean Shepherd, in the middle of the night.

  Now it was just silence.

  “You look worried, Colonel.”

  He looked over at her. The way she said “Colonel.”

  “Could be nothing. Might be one helluva solar storm, that’s all.”

  That seemed to scare her and she looked to the western horizon to where the sun was now low, hanging over the Smokies.

  “It isn’t blowing up or something, is it?”

  He laughed.

  “My dear mother-in-law. If it had blown up, would we still be seeing it?”

  A bit embarrassed, she shook her head.

  “Major storm on the sun’s surface will send out heavy bursts of various radiations. That’s what triggers the northern lights.”

  “Never seen them.”

  “Well, you’re not a Yankee, that’s why. Sometimes the storm is so intense it sets off an electrical discharge in the atmosphere that short-circuits electronic equipment.”

  “But the cars?”

  “Most cars today are loaded with computers. It might explain why yours keeps running and others stopped.”

  “People should have kept those old Fords,” she said with a nervous smile.

  “Let’s do this, though,” he said quietly. “I’m worried about Elizabeth; let’s drive downtown, see if we can spot her.”

  “Fine with me.”

  She shifted the car into gear. At the bottom of the driveway he caught sight of Jennifer, shouted for her to pile in, and she ran over, delighted, climbing over her father and sitting between the two of them. That’s the way it used to be forty years ago, he realized. Mom and Dad out for a drive, the kid between them, no bucket seats yet, except in sports cars, Junior not locked up in the back and, of course, belted in.

  John just hoped Tom Barker, the town’s chief of police, didn’t spot them. Although John was now a well-confirmed local, Barker might just lay a ticket on them if in a foul mood.

  They arrived to the bottom of the hill and Old 70 was empty except for a couple of abandoned cars by the side of the road. But out on the interstate there was indeed a “bunch of cars” as Jennifer had described it. Vehicles on the shoulders, some stalled right in the lanes. Not a traffic jam though, just as if everyone had shut their engines off at the same time and drifted to a stop. Nearly all the passengers were out, some looking over towards them as the Edsel pulled out onto 70 and headed towards town, driving parallel to the interstate.