Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  But he wasn’t going to get any satisfaction. It didn’t matter how much he raged, how many things he hit, he couldn’t vent on the one guy who deserved it.

  He’d blown it. He’d just let a guy get away with shooting a bunch of people dead while he watched. He could have made a difference, he could have done something. He should have, but he’d blown it.

  Fuck. Shit. Fuck.

  Jake stormed over to the battered messenger bike, lifted it up again, climbed on, and ignoring the people trying to help him, cranked the pedals hard, no particular destination in mind. He just wanted to be away from there.

  He needed to think smart. The cops might be swamped, but they wouldn’t ignore a shooting, even if Joe Public couldn’t call it in on their cells. He wasn’t going to try to explain what the fuck was going on, mainly because he didn’t have a clue.

  Yet.

  That was a powerful word.

  Yet.

  It suggested he would have the answers at some point down the line.

  He lived and died by that word. It meant there was a way to change things, even if he didn’t know what he was dealing with right now.

  Angling down a side street, Jake swung over to the curb. In the shadow of tall trees, he pulled over, still straddling the bike, and pulled out his cell phone. He had two reasons to hope it would have survived the wipeout. One, he’d been underground—a long way down—when the blast hit, assuming it was a blast of some sort. The other, ever since mustering out of the service, he’d been paranoid about being cut off and paid good money for a satellite phone. As long as the hundreds of feet of bedrock shielded the phone’s electronics, it should still be able to receive a signal from one of several satellites in low earth orbit. He didn’t want to think about the fact that they had taken out the relay towers. He deserved a bit of luck.

  He thumbed down the green call icon. There was no dial tone to tell him if it was alive or not. The only way he’d know if there was a connection to the satellite uplink was if it held the call.

  He dialed quickly. It was a number he knew by heart. He hadn’t programmed it in—the guy he was calling was paranoid about people from the past catching up with him. Jake couldn’t blame him.

  There were plenty of people lining up to do bad things to Ryan Johnson. Russian mafia, Serbian goons, Latvians, Lithuanians, all along the entire bloc. He wasn’t a popular man. Jake wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, something related to computers and fire walls and making a lot of money for a lot of mean people and then upsetting them. Badly.

  Ryan was also the only person Jake knew who was paranoid enough to shield his home electronics and carry a sat phone.

  The phone rang twice before it was answered.

  “Yo.” That was it, just the one syllable.

  Jake grinned with relief. “Ryan. It’s Jake.”

  “Jake?” There was a moment’s silence. “Long time.” The tone was a little less guarded, yet despite the words, Ryan was obviously not happy to hear from him. But that was Ryan. Jake didn’t even know his real name, despite the fact he’d known the guy most of his adult life. Some people liked to keep their secrets. He didn’t know what had gone down with Ryan, and he didn’t want to. Right now, Ryan was the only person he could think of who had the skill set to help.

  Jake got right to it: “You busy?”

  That earned a chuckle. Ryan had sworn he’d turned his life around when he’d returned to New York a few months back, done with freelancing, as he put it, done with chasing the big-money score and being some bastard’s puppet; now he was just looking to keep his head down.

  Jake believed him, but unfortunately that wasn’t enough to stop him from saying, “I need a favor.”

  “Everyone who calls does. So what do you think I can do you for?”

  “To be honest, I’m not really sure.”

  “My favorite kind of favor.”

  “Okay, here’s what’s just happened . . . I just walked into the middle of a shit storm on Wall Street. A bunch of guys were messing around with the computers on the trading floor, and now they’re dead. I need to know what they were doing, and why.”

  “One question before we get into this.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you do the killing?” There was no judgment in the question. Ryan had a history of violence. It was simply part of the world he’d grown up in.

  “No. But I saw who did, and I couldn’t stop it from happening. That’s why I want to know what was worth their lives.”

  “Yeah, all right, man, I can see that. Taking on the troubles of the world. I’m cool with that. The networks are fried since this whole sunfail thing, so I can’t do it from here, but I can bounce down there and work my magic. In and out before anyone notices.”

  “Thanks, man. You know the drill: don’t leave any trace, and don’t get caught. I really don’t want to have to explain what I’ve got you involved in to Von.”

  Ryan laughed. “Almost worth getting busted for that conversation. I’ll call when I’m done.”

  “I owe you. And do me a second favor while you’re on it: give my love to that gorgeous cousin of mine.” Blood ran deep in this life. It didn’t matter if you’d taken the road from the projects into the military or into and out of gang life, blood was blood. You didn’t fuck with blood.

  Yvonne, Ryan’s partner, was blood.

  Jake knew that was the only reason he’d been the one they’d called when they hit town rather than just keeping their heads down. He’d read the stuff in the papers about Ryan’s crew out in Russia damn near triggering an international incident. They were private contractors. Mercenaries by another name. Ryan wasn’t muscle, he was the brains. There was a guy called Markham who was basically a grunt. Jake had heard stories: how he’d been suspected of rape and a bunch of other crimes against the locals, and turned up lynched by the same locals who’d had enough of his shit. The only reference in the press back home was to a businessman by the same name who had died while working out there—no mention of a memorial service or anything of the sort. But that was all parallel-world stuff for Jake. He’d been an enlisted man. There was a proper way of doing things, and you didn’t fuck with the locals, not when you were out there to keep the peace.

  “Will do.” The connection dropped.

  Jake tucked the phone back into his pocket. He felt a little better now—a problem shared and all that. He trusted Ryan. The guy had too much to lose to be a dick. And he knew computers better than anyone Jake had ever met. He could make them dance and sing. He’d come up with the goods.

  The next question, Jake thought as he hopped off the bike and started walking it down the street to keep moving, was a big-picture one: How does all of this fit together?

  There was a pattern here and he wasn’t seeing it. First it had been Fort Hamilton, then the subway, the power grid, finally the stock exchange. So how did it all connect?

  Despite hitting Fort Hamilton first, that attack didn’t jive with what he’d witnessed at Wall Street. It was violent. Bloody. Lethal. But it was intimate too. Not like 9/11, which was about spreading the fear. Not just the murders, but the fact that the killer had been riding one of the few working engines in the city. It was like one of those damned finger puzzles, those little Chinese torture devices, where the more you worried at them the harder they clung to your fingers.

  He had little pieces of the puzzle, things he could extrapolate from, like how the killer had known in advance the power would go out, just like the guys spray-painting the words of their prophets on the subway walls had known the lights were going out. Did that mean they were in this together?

  Back in the Army they’d used hardened batteries that were designed to keep working even in the event of an EMP. It wasn’t inconceivable the motorcycle had been shielded in the same way; logically then, the team could have been utilizing a shielded battery to power up the computers. Lots of ifs and coulds and shoulds in there, but realistically, there was always going to be a logic
al solution to each stage of the chaos they’d unleashed. The problem wasn’t working it out so much as working back from the effect to find the cause, and right now, the best he could do was stick with the assumption that the killer knew what was happening. The way the victims deferred to him before he’d put bullets in their heads suggested he was the big man.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t just a foot soldier answering to a bigger man, because every revolution needed men on the ground who could handle the killing.

  Jake reached the corner where Varick angled off West Broadway, leaving a narrow little wedge of brown grass and stunted shrubs. A single row of trees wilted in the middle. The “square” wasn’t big enough to warrant a park bench.

  This was usually a quiet spot, depressingly so. The streets were wide, the buildings light-industrial complexes housing utility companies and small manufacturing plants. There were a couple of tech companies and an art academy had moved into one of the old factory units. And, of course, fancy converted lofts for multimillionaires

  But not today.

  It was so crowded that Jake stopped in his tracks, stunned by the wave of noise that rolled over him. A wall of people blocked his way. The noise was inhuman.

  It took him a moment to realize what he was hearing, then the first in a pack of dogs went racing past. They were a mixed bunch—terriers, retrievers, Labradors, mongrels, and fighting dogs. They darted through the crowd, finding gaps in the gathered people that hadn’t been there seconds before, breaching the wall of flesh, howling as they ran. Their voices rose in a loud, mournful wail. It made the hair on the nape of Jake’s neck prickle as a shiver ran down his spine.

  Fear gripped the crowd, adding to the cacophony. Some were wailing, others muttering or shouting, with little sense to any of the sound.

  They weren’t staring at the dogs, he realized, as the pack moved on. Everyone was looking at the ground around their feet.

  Jake pushed his way forward, unwilling to relinquish his grip on the bike.

  The grass was littered with small, broken, feathered bodies.

  Birds.

  Thousands upon thousands of birds, birds of every shape and size—pigeons, usually ground grubbers, made up maybe half of them, along with starlings, crows, magpies, and more brightly colored finches and thrushes.

  And all of them were dead. Every single one of them, though some of the carcasses still twitched, clinging to the last shreds of life as their nervous systems shut down.

  Jake looked at the sky. There wasn’t a single bird up there.

  There were more fallen birds on the sidewalk, turning it into a path of black feathers. Even more lay in the streets around him, the littered bodies spreading far beyond the boundaries of the little park.

  Apparently all of the birds across the city had fallen out of the sky. So many of them.

  Someone beside him turned, deathly white, and gripped his arm. “It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s the end of the world . . . we’re all going to die, aren’t we?”

  Beside her someone else asked, “Have you made your peace with God, because if you haven’t you’re going to hell.”

  And that terror spread like wildfire.

  Jake wasn’t listening, he was thinking.

  Birds flew on air currents. Their brains adjusted in order to read the wind. But it wasn’t just the wind, was it? They flew according to magnetic fields. Without magnetic fields to follow they couldn’t fly right. If something had interfered with the magnetic fields across New York, every bird in the sky would have fallen.

  There was science behind this end-of-the-world horror.

  An EMP would’ve overridden the magnetic field, like when you skipped a stone across a still pond. The waves rippled out, affecting the whole surface. It made sense. He liked when things made sense.

  It fit with the notion that the killer had been forewarned. It wasn’t supernatural bullshit. This supported his first guess: an EMP or something like that had hit the city, and the killer knew exactly where and when it was going to be set off. That was why he was on the old motorcycle; it wasn’t reliant upon the kind of circuitry that would have been fried by an electromagnetic pulse.

  This might also explain why his sat phone had survived while he was deep underground.

  A burst of static caused him to turn around. Across the street, right by the Franklin Street station’s stairs, he saw a group of college-age kids clustered around a working radio. He could hear the crackle, and as he closed the distance between them, the voice of the newscaster: “. . . similar outages have been reported in Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, and Atlanta so far. We’ll keep you up to date with all developments when news comes in, but we now understand that most of the United States has been affected, with unconfirmed reports of trouble in London, Paris, and Berlin as well . . .”

  Everything he thought he knew was wrong. It couldn’t be an EMP. Not on that kind of scale. It was impossible.

  An EMP could perhaps take out a city, but not an entire country. There was just no way. And reports of London, Paris, and Berlin being hit? It couldn’t be an EMP.

  Not unless it was some sort of concerted terror effort, hitting strategic locations, triggered remotely. But the kind of planning and precision that would require? Occam’s razor came into play, surely. Sometimes the easiest possible answer was the right answer and the rest were all just conspiracy theories. It was hard to believe anyone could pull off something that big without attracting the attention of the NSA, Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, or any of the other law-enforcement acronyms out there. No. This was something else. It had to be.

  A glassy-eyed little man hoisted up his End of Days placard.

  Jake wasn’t laughing.

  Was it? Were all the whackos finally right? Even a stopped clock’s right twice a day, he thought, unhelpfully.

  Maybe it was the end of the world and God had kicked things off by cutting the electricity first. Go fuck yourself, he thought bitterly, not buying the whole apocalypse crap. It didn’t work. For one thing, if it was divine, surely the air would be fucked, the sun black or something a bit more . . . Hollywood? The biggest threat now was snow as day faded into evening. As raptures went, it was pretty lame.

  And if it really was the end of the world, why had that guy hit the stock exchange? It’s not like he could take stocks and bonds with him into the afterlife. Which meant something else had to be going on. Something much more mundane, that could be explained with good old-fashioned science, with the same two things at its root, money and power.

  Jake wasn’t a scientist, he was a soldier. He had the basic skill sets of an engineer, more than enough to get him the job with the MTA, and a decent understanding of the stuff he needed to know, but when it got into the realms of hard science, quantum entanglement, dark matter, string theory, and all of the other buzz words of the day, there were better men than him to talk to. Men like Dr. Harry Kane, who was pretty much the smartest person in the room, no matter what room he happened to be in.

  He’d met Harry when his unit had been paired with a British team for a joint exercise. Harry was old money. His family owned a castle somewhere in the highlands of Scotland. His pet theory was how everyone misunderstood Time’s Arrow, how it was all about nature trying to find equilibrium rather than flowing in a direction of past to future. He explained it using a coffee cup he’d watch gradually go from steaming hot to tepid to cold. The molecules in the liquid weren’t in a pure state. They were affected by their environment, just like people were—people living in the projects found a different equilibrium to those living in the high-rises of Manhattan, it was all about the choices life presented and the levels it offered—trying to find a state of equilibrium with the world around them.

  Harry had mustered his way out a couple of years after Jake, moving over to the States for work and switching from applied engineering to chemical engineering research. He’d been teaching up at Columbia since then, though he traveled across the
world.

  They’d celebrated his appointment the last time they were together. Hard. Jake had very few memories of that particular weekend beyond the fact he’d woken up with someone, feeling like shit, dazed and confused and looking to get out before she woke up, which was always a classy move. Still, no point crying over some one-night stand. She’d live. He’d live. It was all about perspective. They were both consenting adults, they’d had a good time, and he’d saved her the walk of shame.

  He didn’t need to be a scientist to know he shouldn’t be wasting his time thinking about a one-night stand. First and foremost, he needed to work out what was going on, what it meant, and how long it was going to last. Without those three pieces of information there was no way he’d be able to counteract it.

  And there was one more nagging question he couldn’t shake: Where does Sophie Keane fit into all of this?

  I’m not who you think I am.

  Jake shouldered his way through the crowd and mounted up again. It was going to be a long ride up to Columbia and he had a lot to think about on the way.

  Chapter Fourteen

  CIVILIZATION TEETERED ON THE BRINK. The only conceivable positive was that priorities had changed overnight. Values shifted. Value itself shifted away from Xboxes and PlayStations, designer labels, and all that other stuff the ad men told us to crave. If it wasn’t food or some other life-giving necessity, it was losing value fast. Things hadn’t quite degenerated to the point that gold, diamonds, and paper money were worthless, but as people slowly began to realize what was happening around them the obsession with wealth changed beyond all recognition.

  It had only just begun, but that tidal shift wouldn’t be long in coming.

  She knew how they’d react, she’d been trained to think the same way and act differently: protect the important stuff of life; after food and shelter it was medicine—ibuprofen, aspirin, insulin, inhalers, things people needed to survive. Company databases were a long way down the list of essentials. And when a cataclysmic event had rendered said company databases nothing more than a bank of inert computer hard drives, the natural thought was: Why bother when there are other more immediate concerns?