INVASION USA (Book 1) - The End of Modern Civilization

by T I WADE

  Unconnected to the outside world the party went on for another 30 minutes, the ranch being so isolated and independent from the rest of the world. Nobody noticed anything different. Buck looked at the new sound system for a few minutes, scratched his head and put it down. It was completely dead. Nobody even thought to look at the television.

  Oprah and Ben were getting bored with all the adult revelry, and decided to go and listen in to the ham radio in the house. Grandpa Roebels was still at the party, and with Preston’s permission they walked out of the hangar and over to the house with Oliver. They could listen in on the radio chatter until Martie’s grandfather wanted to go to bed. Ben saw several parts of the horizon lit up. He was used to the bright skies over L.A., and with this being New Year’s Eve, he thought nothing of it.

  They approached the quiet radio and sat down to listen. It was on the usual frequency they all used to talk to one another, but the set was totally quiet. It was humming, and the dials and tuning screen lit up as usual. Built in the late 1960s, the set was an old one but extremely powerful.

  The kids waited for ten minutes and not one voice came on. They got bored, and Ben pressed the talk switch and called their house to see if their father was home, even though they knew he wouldn’t be. He was at the station in Lancaster on night duty and wouldn’t be home until early morning when they had arranged to speak to him at early east coast time.

  There were a couple of scratches as the set picked up something. Ben thought he heard somebody calling for help. It was very faint and he called the unknown caller back. Everybody else they usually talked to was at the party, and they finally gave up on the radio when Michael helped in a singing Grandpa Roebels, winked at the kids, and swayed down the hall to put his happy father to bed.

  * * *

  Times Square quickly became a mess. It was only seconds after the ball had dropped when the large advertising banners lighting up the Square started flickering on and off. A large car, out of control, crashed into a group of pedestrians alongside the barriers that blocked the area off for the immense crowd of partiers. Then another car went out of control a few feet behind the first one. Suddenly, several other motor vehicles either came to a halt or seemed to spin, hitting the snow mounted on the sides of the roads, and smashed into several people on the street and onto sidewalks. One cannoned through a shop window. What had been a happy occasion moments before became a scene of intense confusion and hysteria as things seemed to go horribly wrong. Then, several seconds later, all the advertising banners went out completely, and the street lights followed suit. Shop windows went black as their lights went out. The sky was very overcast, and it started to snow again.

  After several more seconds, the whole city light system went out, and apart from a few automobile headlights that were still on, the city around Times Square went very dark. Screams erupted from within the crowd of over one million people in Times Square. The Square, plus dozens of roads and side streets were crammed with party people who had just been dancing, enjoying the togetherness of the holiday scene. It was eerie as people, now virtually blind, tried to move in different directions to escape the blackness. Shop owners quickly closed their doors, scared that bad people might use the darkness to steal their tills. Others in stores sat there perplexed at what to do next. Many were from out of town, and only needed to walk to their hotels, which they assumed would have electricity, or at least back-up generators. This was America for God’s sake, and New York! The power outage was surely for a short period of time.

  Thousands immediately got on their cell phones to call friends and family, wanting to tell them about the excitement, but not even the lights of the thousands of iPhones, Blackberries or hundreds of other types even glowed in the dark like they did moments before. They were all as useless as pieces of simple, molded plastic.

  On the streets, it became blacker and blacker as lights from cars went off here and there. Screams increased as people fell underfoot in the masses who all wanted to scramble in different directions at the same time. A fire started in the shop the car had crashed into, and a little light came back to Times Square. Candles came on in several apartments around the area and the snow started falling harder. A bitterly cold wind began to blow down the streets, increasing the wind-chill factor.

  Suddenly, the first gunshot of millions more to come in New York and around the world, was heard as a policeman was trying to stop someone stealing from a shop that was ablaze. The policeman went down, the man and his gun could be seen in the light of the fire, and immediately another three policemen were on the scene, guns blazing at the man. Several bystanders who were trying to get past the fire and did not see what was going on became the victims of those bullets. They fell and the thief who had shot the first policeman disappeared into the dark shadows. More policemen arrived from the other side of the street and they all were trying to sort out the mass of bodies into orderly queues with a couple tending to the dead on the ground.

  A few seconds later, the wind starting howling as a storm gathered strength and a massive stampede ensued. People went down in the thousands, trampled underfoot until their cries for help died with them. On the fringes of the massive crowd, people began dispersing onto other streets—many back to their hotel rooms. Fires were beginning to envelope the cars and buildings they had crashed into. Slowly the streets came visible again as the light and heat of the fires intensified. Fifteen minutes after the crisis started, a gas main blew just south of Times Square and a thousand people disappeared in the blast of searing heat that came with it. The massive explosion disintegrated several shop windows and weakened the whole 12-story building above them.

  Only minutes later, the whole building came crashing down onto the swollen mass of dead and injured people in the street, and killed hundreds more as it bounced against the building on the other side of the street and exploded outwards for another block in either direction—bricks and pieces of metal scything through the crowds. The gas explosion had reached out a couple of blocks and had started another dozen fires on the streets around it. The streets that had been dark and cold only moments before became hotter than hell, and the noise of the growing flames were pierced with hundreds of high-pitched screams of the people who could not escape the devastation.

  Within minutes of the dropping of the ball in Times Square, hundreds of people around the Square were either dead or dying. The area had no place on the ground where a body didn’t lie. It was carnage like New York had not seen since 9/11.

  The rest of the city was in just as much turmoil. There were fires everywhere. Millions of people were trying to get somewhere to either escape what was happening behind them, or because they thought that somewhere else there must be a safe haven from this nightmare. Where occupants were awake in city buildings, candles lit up every window and thousands looked down into the worsening streets below them and watched as people ran here and there. The fires seemed to grow from nothing. The snow was falling heavily now and the flakes made the views from the windows more surreal. This was the United States of America. This didn’t happen here in New York. Everyone did what they always did when they had a few spare feet and could take a breather—they looked at their phones and shook them, tried to text with them, or just shouted into them hoping they would get a response.

  There were no fire engines, ambulances, or police cars screaming by, their sirens making that noise that comforts everyone in the middle of a crisis. Apart from human screams from every direction, and the crackling of fires in the vicinity, the snow made New York eerie and visibility was only several yards in either direction.

  For many who reached their hotels, they found the doors locked and the insides darker than the streets outside. There were already people banging on the doors to be let in. The occupants of the buildings higher up could see no more than the people in the streets far below them.

  The weather predictions came true 30 minutes after midnight. Newscasters had warned partiers’ to get somewhere wa
rm and safe because the whole of Manhattan and most of New York and New Jersey would experience white-out conditions within an hour or two after midnight.

  The three airports in the metro New York area had been exchanging inbound and outbound flight as fast as possible all evening. There were 35 flights on final approach to the three airports and another 12 only minutes into the air. These flights, in their most critical stage of flight didn’t see the first 60 seconds into the New Year, as their systems died and 41 aircraft fell out of the skies, igniting entire suburbs and whole city blocks with their deadly cargos of fuel.

  One experienced Southwest pilot felt his aircraft’s controls go dead a minute after takeoff from La Guardia, and immediately veered around to return to the airport to land. But the area he had just taken off from was completely black, as the electrical grid closed down around the airport. The snow had not started to fall and he could still see what he thought was the Hudson.

  It had been done before, and he followed his instincts to copy the pilot who had survived the emergency landing before him. Several other pilots were thinking the same thing, and there were now black shapes everywhere that were out of organized patterns trying to make emergency landings in the same spot. Two collided in mid-air, their fuel igniting immediately and lighting up much of the surrounding area for several seconds as pieces of wing and fuselage fell to the ground beneath them, starting hundreds of fires and killing hundreds of people in their homes.

  The first pilot to react had a manifest of 137 people and six crew, and the light from the mid-air collision gave him an opportunity to set up his approach. Nothing worked apart from manually flying the aircraft—his landing gear was up and he had one small chance to do it.

  He watched as the water flowed up to meet him, gliding the aircraft down as best he could and setting her down gently with his tail and waiting for the shock of the two engines to hit the water. He had manually done what he could to help the landing. The aircraft’s wings hit the water and the whole aircraft, somehow still intact, came to a halt still floating in the flowing river with its right wing caught up on some obstacle, turning the aircraft toward the river’s edge and out of the strong flow of mid-river.

  Within seconds, the experienced crew had the doors open and the passengers were grabbing coats and anything to keep them warm as it began to snow outside the opened doors.

  The passengers scurried and slipped down the wing towards the jetty; fires in the area giving them enough light to see, and helped each other. The pilot left the fuselage last, and as the captain did, another aircraft flew straight into a building on the other side of the river and a warehouse erupted into flames. He could not help but watch. A second aircraft blew up on a bridge to their south and two more seemed to collide in midair, only 100 feet or so above a 30-story apartment block about a mile away. The explosion disintegrated the whole building as it erupted into flames. His co-pilot, John screamed at him just in time for him to see the shock wave coming across the river from the first blast, and he was the last to jump onto the jetty as their aircraft was forced against it by the blast. The wing buckled and it started turning and continuing its journey, being pulled along and out into the river’s flow.

  A large boat of some sort suddenly came out of nowhere and collided with the tail of the aircraft, only feet away from the end of the jetty. It was a large boat, far bigger than the tail area of the aircraft which was starting to sink in the water, and the momentum of the boat pushed it over the rear of the aircraft, snapping the tail off completely. The 737 disappeared in seconds, and the boat crashed into the next jetty further down river and immediately started buckling the whole side of the wharf.

  Someone had found a door that had been broken open by what looked like a large metal piece of another aircraft, still smoldering. It was the warehouse building in front of them and the entire group ran into it and out of the elements outside. The night was as bright as day outside, with fires in every direction. The warehouse looked safe and the snow had started to fall in earnest.

  The surrounding area around JFK International Airport was hit harder than other parts of New York. The aircraft were bigger, with more international flights landing and taking off. With the wind direction from the north to northwest, large 747s were also taking off, one per minute in a northwesterly direction. Full of fuel, they were at their most dangerous and five were in the air over separate areas—two over Ozone Park and one each over East New York, Brownsville, and Brooklyn. As if part of a ballet, all five aircraft lost power at the same second, their left wings already lower because they were all banking left, and they went down fast.

  The cockpit and passenger windows went dark and at 250 miles an hour, the first two hit the ground, erupting in massive fireballs that could be heard 50 miles away. They were over Ozone Park a mile apart, still very low, under full power and very heavy as fuel to their engines was suddenly cut off. These aircraft had been the last two to take off, both flying to Europe, and it took only ten seconds for their engines to die and the first aircraft to hit the ground.

  The lowest aircraft was still rushing forward as it belly-landed and fell on a block of single-story houses, still traveling at 220 miles an hour. It became a speeding bomb as 64,000 gallons of jet fuel blew up all at once and white-hot fire blasted out in all directions— immediately flattening three blocks of houses around it. The moving firebomb kept on for another mile, the blast following it, and the fire reaching 1,000 feet high and wide, killing thousands of people in its path and setting fire to thousands of houses as bits of white-hot metal and other flaming parts flew in every direction. The same happened to the second and third aircraft—both a mile and two miles further out, respectively.

  Whole suburbs and housing districts disintegrated. Brownsville was no more, and within seconds over half of the buildings in the area were destroyed in an explosion of jet fuel or exploding gas mains.

  The fourth Jumbo Jet crashed in Brooklyn seconds later, and this one was nearly vertical as it went in—the blast so strong that it blew out windows as far as Manhattan. Hundreds of buildings exploded, first from the aircraft’s energy and then from gas mains erupting along streets and into buildings for miles around the massive eruption of absolute energy. Flaming pieces of aircraft and masonry flew in all directions, setting fires and killing anything in their path.

  The last aircraft went down a block from the water in Richmond, doing similar types damage in that area. Several jets coming in to JFK flattened miles of housing around Long Beach, Lawrence, Inwood, and Woodmere, with four going down within seconds.

  It had only taken three to four minutes, but the ground had shook as badly as the massive earthquake in Japan in 2010, and east of Manhattan the scene worst than bombing had inflicted on German cities during World War II. The fires grew by the second and gathered momentum faster than people could run. They joined together and became hotter and hotter, causing more explosions and from the highest windows in New York, three separate fire storms began to glow brighter and brighter as they destroyed everything in their wake. The red glow in the night sky from these large deep fires could even be seen through the thick snow that was now falling over the city.

  It was the first time in American history that not one emergency vehicle could move. They were all as dead as the aircraft hitting the ground. There was no electricity, and the gas mains became the second enemy. At the gas supply depots, attempts were made to turn off gas flow, but these electrical units malfunctioned, doing nothing to prevent more gas from going down the lines. There were backup teams of men at the massive gas storage tanks who managed to close down many feeder pipes manually. It took 15 minutes to close down dozens of pipes, but by then the worst damage had already been done.

  Manhattan became silent, with hundreds of fires raging out of control. Areas around southern and eastern Manhattan had fires that were several miles wide and only water could stop their destructive paths. The wind increased in its intensity and so did the snow, whic
h melted long before it hit the ground in many areas.

  With the added problem that nothing electrical worked, there was no communication via television, radio, or phones of any sort. Nobody knew what was going on, no one could get information, and many died sitting up in bed and wondering what was going on outside. All over the United States and the world, the same was happening in urban areas. Aircraft were going down everywhere.

  In daylight areas such as Australia, where it was hot and sunny, pilots tried to glide aircraft of all sorts into survivable landings.

  Unfortunately, these aircraft weren’t made to have zero-engine power and very few survived the turmoil in the air. Every major city in the world, except for three countries, had aircraft somewhere over them. Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Frankfurt, and several major cities worldwide now burned as brightly as New York, and there was not one fire truck available to put the fires out.

  Hundreds of aircraft over the oceans, their passengers often fast asleep, just feel into the water, exploded, and disappeared.

  The Capital building in Washington D.C. had two near misses from opposite directions within seconds of each other, with a third going down less than a mile away several seconds later as the pilot tried to turn back for Reagan. A large Airbus went into the middle of the Pentagon, full of fuel, and literally blew the insides of the building to bits of rubble. The White House was also nearly hit as an aircraft flew blindly overhead less than a hundred feet over the roof. It was shot at by over 100 troops around the White House grounds, peppering the aircraft, and it went down and exploded on the National Mall, destroying several Smithsonian museum buildings in its path.

  * * *

  Space was now a major problem for those who were in an unfortunate place at the wrong time. Commander John Scott, currently in control of the world’s space station was looking down at Earth, holding a small glass of California bubbly that had been sent up with the last resupply for the New Year, when entire areas of the Eastern seaboard where his wife and two kids were already fast asleep, and western Europe as far as he could see, suddenly blinked and went black. He looked down, puzzled for a split second, when suddenly more than 50 alarms sounded inside the craft, telling the crew of malfunctions in every part of their living habitat.