by T I WADE
Whole neighborhoods were no more. Half of Brooklyn was a blackened mess of smoking ruins, many buildings still blazing hundreds of feet into the air. In every direction, there were dead bodies strewn like confetti and many injured people begged for help. There was no help, however, and no one knew if it would ever come.
Gunshots could be heard every now and again. People were beginning to loot the dead bodies, feeling in their pockets for anything valuable. Everything and anything was taken, especially any fancy new cell phones. Many still seemed to think that they still had value.
In less damaged areas, people looked outside their windows and many had guns in their hands, looking for anybody who might want to cause them trouble. In the less-damaged suburbs, hundreds of people were walking around aimlessly, looking for people they knew. A couple of men were molesting a girl—she was pushed up against a wall, screaming her head off, and people just shuffled by, oblivious to the attack going on.
Corner stores were becoming dangerous areas as the masses became hungry. Many families had enough food stored in their still cold refrigerators and pantries to last a few days, but many had nothing, and shots began to ring out across New York as shop owners began defending themselves against people with hoods over their heads who were quickly forming into groups or gangs.
Several of the warehouses on the Hudson River were still ablaze, the flames reaching as high as 100 feet in the air. The 143 survivors of the only aircraft in the New York area were huddled and reasonably warm in a massive walk-in refrigerator they had found in the unheated warehouse. For the first couple of hours, they had broken the doors down of several offices and sat in the blackness, using the warmth trapped in them until it got too cold to stay. A half-empty bottle of bourbon was found in one of the office desk drawers, and several of the passengers decided that consumption of its contents was necessary.
The 45-degree temperature refrigerator was found by the co-pilot John while he inspected the large warehouse for a warmer place than the offices. It was 5:00 am when he informed the captain what he had found and ushered his group of 40 people with him in one of the offices down the flight of stairs and into the large refrigerator.
The captain, once he had checked the area for safety, sat back behind the desk in a soft leather chair in the most luxurious corner office in the warehouse, and put his feet up on the desk. Two of his flight attendants were stretched out on two couches and were comfortable, watching him. Captain Mallory went through the desk drawers and found an old bottle of extremely good quality single-malt scotch and pulled out three of the four glasses, pouring three large tots and giving one each to the two girls. He savored the beverage, one of his favorites, and placed the only hundred dollar bill in his wallet back in the drawer as a replacement cost. At 5:00 in the morning, and with the office getting cold, he decided to get up and look around again to check out what John and his group had found.
Under normal circumstances, the warehouse would have been well-secured and should have been. There were security cameras everywhere. Many people had stood in front of them for the first hour, dancing and waving and trying to get noticed so that help would come and find them. They certainly did not know what was going on anymore than anyone else, but were determined to stay in the warehouse after several had gone to the large doors and small steel-caged windows around the building to look outside. They saw and heard flames, smoke, and saw snow falling sideways, and dozens of explosions. There was a red glow in every direction, and they felt safe with the cold Hudson just a few yards away, a water sanctuary if the building caught fire.
Inside the warehouse, and for the ones interested in looking around, a couple of powerful flashlights had been found in a security office. All the monitors were centralized in this office, but they were all dormant and every switch was tried to see if they could turn on something, with no luck. The three food dispensers in the small cafeteria had already been broken open, the Captain noticed on his second inspection, and the spoils must have been taken back for the hungry to eat.
He checked the door through which they had initially entered the building. Their entrance had been a thick wooden door, forced open and its lock broken by a large and heavy piece of falling debris, which he had noticed later was a sliced up end piece of a winglet from a Boeing 747—far bigger than the aircraft he had ditched successfully earlier. He could see part of the last couple letters and colors of Lufthansa once he and several others had pulled it away from the split door. It had still been very warm to the touch. He and the co-pilot had closed the door once they were all inside, and one of the passengers had found a forklift and a pallet of boxes. Because it was a gas-operated forklift, the passenger had gotten it to work and positioned it by the door so nobody could open it from outside. The good guys coming to rescue them would have sirens blaring, they figured.
Captain Mallory’s flashlight was a powerful one, and it lit up large areas of the cavernous space. He found the refrigerator door and noticed that the temperature inside was a little warmer than outside. He told his co-pilot to stay put—he was only doing a security check since his passengers were still his concern.
Then he started seriously looking around. There were hundreds of wooden cases on several steel packing shelves in the middle of the warehouse. Underneath the second-floor offices were several luxury motor vehicles neatly parked in a row, which looked like they were in bondage, or had just come off or were going on a ship. He was beginning to realize that they might be in a customs warehouse and that this was good for security, but bad when the office personnel came in and found their whiskey stolen. He tried each vehicle which had keys in the ignition, but they were all lifeless. He assumed that their batteries had been taken out for shipping purposes.
Then he found a military section of vehicles in the far corner under the offices. Again, there were several trucks and Hum-vees in a neat row. He tried several of them and they were also dead. It was as if nothing worked. He gave up searching for transportation and went back to the office. The two flight attendants had found a couple of blankets and were huddled up on one of the couches head to foot to keep warm, and were fast asleep.
He dozed off for a couple of hours and woke up at dawn to the sound of gunfire outside his office window. Captain Mallory carefully moved the blinds, noticed the thick steel bars on the window, and was shocked at how bad the smoke and air was outside. He couldn’t see much, but the gunfire was pretty rapid. A few seconds later, he watched as a dozen uniformed security police came running down the road past the warehouse, their pistols drawn and firing behind them as they ran. Then, an old 1960s Chevy truck came into view with several non-uniformed men in the cab and standing in the back, and they were firing at the security guards with shotguns and hunting rifles. The captain saw two men go down and the truck drove straight over the fallen bodies, one who was trying to get up as it drove over him and out of view following the rest. The captain just stared at the two still bodies lying on the ground.
“What’s happening out there, Captain Mallory?” asked Pam one of his flight attendants, now awake and watching him with big eyes.
“I can’t believe it,” responded the pilot in shock. “It’s like a Hollywood gangster movie out here. I saw a dozen armed security guards being chased by a truck load of what looked like thugs and they killed two of the guards, right here in front of our building. Look, their bodies are still down there.”
A few seconds later more gunfire could be heard, and then an explosion. The captain, still looking out of the window, saw a couple of the thugs he had seen in the truck seconds earlier come running back, this time they were being chased and they were firing behind them. One got hit and fell, the other just left him and ran out of view. Then several of the same police officers came into view. They looked tired and dirty with black marks all over their uniforms. Only one was wearing a hat, but suddenly Captain Mallory felt good. The police were there, everything was going to be ok! We are going to be saved!
The
good feeling only lasted for a second or two.
What happened next he couldn’t believe and made him want to be sick. The six police officers ran up to the man on the ground who was now injured. He was not badly injured. His shotgun was lying several yards behind him where he had dropped it and he lay on the ground on his back, unarmed, and put his hands in the air. One of the policemen picked up the shotgun, checked that it was loaded, walked up to the surrendering man on the ground and literally blew the poor man’s head off. The rest in police uniform just watched and then they all turned and then carried on running after the other one who was already out of sight.
Captain Mallory’s face went white. What he had seen was not right. He had just witnessed a policeman commit murder and several of his colleagues just looked on and did nothing. What was going on out there? Then he realized that there was much more going on than he had realized and that he, his crew, and his passengers were in more danger than he had anticipated. It was time to find something to protect his crew and passengers, just in case. He suddenly didn’t know who the dangerous people were, and they would have to leave the warehouse at some point.
As he was thinking this, several more shots rang out and now he could hear them in different directions with different types of weapons, and he wished he had taken the cockpit revolver with him when he had left the plane. It was time to look around the warehouse again.
* * *
Washington looked no different from New York and a thousand other cities around the world. Fires were devastating large areas of the city, and rich and poor people alike had the same problems. Whole suburbs were still burning, or were smoldering ruins where the fires had run out of fuel or had moved on to richer pastures. Parts of the nation’s Capital were on fire. The fires from blown gas mains had kept the entire area aglow for hours as they burned with a white hot heat.
By dawn it was still extremely hot, with fires starting up and dying down, hundreds of buildings crumbling into burnt ashes, and whole streets becoming unrecognizable. People had long forgotten what fire could do to buildings without the presence of fire departments. The Pentagon was still standing, but half of the building was a smoldering mass, as were many of the main blocks in and around the city.
The White House was still in one piece, with the large expanses of open ground around it dark and quiet. The large building was as dark as the rest of the city blocks which were not on fire. Several flashlights belonging to security personnel could be seen on the grounds and candles were in many of the windows.
Hundreds of military figures huddled around as the sun came up, and even through the smoke, which was being cleared by a gentle easterly wind, new sandbagged machine gun and mortar positions could be seen all over the gardens.
Inside the White House, the halls around the Oval Office were protected by several soldiers and police with weapons ready—the President and a couple of his staff were working hard trying to find lines of communications that worked so they could get information on who had attacked the United States of America.
“What do you mean we don’t have one line of radio, satellite, or even a pair of bongo drums for communication? I thought we had the best in the world?” he shouted at two men in military uniform, one a Major and one a Colonel—the two most ranking officers at the White House that night.
“Everything is down, sir,” replied the Colonel. “Satellites, microwave towers, computers, radios, even my Blackberry doesn’t work, Mr. President.”
“Even the coffee machine is down, sir,” added the Major to try and emphasize the seriousness the situation. “The kitchen is trying to rustle up some food for you and the First Lady, sir, but they can only cook on one gas oven right now.”
“I can’t understand, where are all the troops we have in the close vicinity around the White House, and we have seen no reinforcements since midnight?” questioned the Colonel looking worried. He was not used to being in the Oval Office itself, since he was only in charge of last night’s security for the White House and a mere minion in the system. “Andrews should have sent in more troops by now. I’ve heard word that the Pentagon took direct hits, but we haven’t verified the information, Mr. President.”
“Then why don’t you get a Hum-vee and drive out to take a look?” asked the President, sarcastically.
“Nothing works, sir,” replied the Colonel. “Not one vehicle on the White House grounds—civilian or military—works, Mr. President. There is not one electrical machine in the White House, or outside the White House, that works, sir. We’ve tried for hours. We’ve had everybody who knows anything about electronics working since midnight. We can’t even get your coffee machine to work.”
“Is there no traffic on the streets? Flag down a car or bus or something. There must be something that is moving out there,” the President added, now getting angry.
“We saw an old car light up the street and pass a couple of hours ago, but it disappeared before any of our troops could commandeer it. There’s one thing one of the cooks told us about an hour ago and we are looking into it, sir. Something about President Kennedy putting in a back-up electrical system in the 1960s—The Bay of Pigs time—in case something like this happened and he had to bunker down here. We found an old safe room, prepared for a long stay. It hadn’t been opened for years, but has a vast array of canned food stuff. We have a team carefully going through all the known parts of the basement areas looking for something that might have been walled up or closed off. Until then, sir, its tea and BBQ until we get the electricity back on.”
“How many troops do we have here currently, Colonel?”
“One hundred and forty Marines, 25 police officers and 20 members of the Secret Service. For civilians, we have you and your family, your mother in-law, six cooks, three service personnel, three cleaners and a couple others. New Year’s Eve is known to be the quietest time at the White House. Even you and your wife were meant to out celebrating, sir.”
“I don’t know if my wife’s migraine was good news or not?” he replied. “I suppose we could be stuck in a worse place than here.”
“The Secret Service would have had your back, sir, even though your vehicle is as dead as the rest.”
* * *
The source of the American President’s current problems, Comrade Chunqiao, was still in the board room. Lunch had been a long and grand affair. For three hours they had eaten, drank, and talked among themselves discussing the cleverness of their leader, who was now the leader of the whole world, as well as the latest news he had given them—his secret plan to destroy their own government. Nobody spoke badly about the plan. Nobody knew who to trust, and if negative words reached back to the Chairman, their fate could also be the same as their current government leaders.
It was just after 8:00 that evening, and the sixteen men were drinking shaojiu, the local Chinese liquor, warmed up expertly by the girls in red just as Lee Wang had done years earlier. Many looked at the screens as the light and dark areas rotated with the Earth’s movement and one thing was always there. As soon as the sun set in new parts of the world, the lights of large bright fires could be seen. There weren’t many in Africa. Several large lights could be seen in Cape Town and areas of Johannesburg, Cairo, Nairobi and Kinshasa where aircraft must have gone down. The rest of that continent was dark.
Many parts of Asia looked untouched and were still lit up, but Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong had fires burning as large as New York. New York was about to see dawn on east coast. Much of Japan and South Korea had the same-sized fires burning. China was darker in certain areas and normal in others. Beijing was a total black-out, but Nanjing where they were and Shanghai looked normal. Russia had been dark everywhere, but its major cities had fires burning, and the same with Australia and New Zealand.
The map on the bottom was totally void of movement. The number of working aircraft transponders was zero. There was not one aircraft in the air anywhere in the world.
At precisely 8:00, the Ch
airman approached the podium with a smile on his face. The room went quiet, the girls in red left the room, and the men sat down in their comfortable, leather board room chairs.
“It is done,” exclaimed the smiling Chairman to his audience. Many were not as sober as when they had arrived 12 hours earlier, but the Chairman himself was in much the same condition. “Our first phase of the timeline is complete, Comrades, and by the lights on our top world map, our success is as I planned. We have run many scenarios on our computers over the last couple of years and will never know for certain what we have achieved, as we have no ears and eyes out there except our three satellites. The first scenario after the pushing of the first button was for a timeline of between seven to twelve hours. At this time, we are about to see dawn appear on the American east coast. It has been daylight in western Europe for five of those seven hours, and the scenario I felt would be most accurate would be the following information, based on the world’s current temperatures. First, the United States of America would be worst hit. Purely on weather conditions, the numbers of aircraft in the air, and the cities destroyed, the American population, by my best scenario, should have decreased by 35 million people.”
“The reduction in Canada is far less, but both American and Canadian death toll numbers will increase in the next 12 hours with people beginning to freeze to death. Within another couple of days, another 50 million Americans and 15 million Canadians will die. That is a potential total of 100 million people terminated in North America alone. South America is of little concern and that includes Mexico. We have 50 of our termination squads moving along the America/Mexico border ready to terminate anybody moving south. In Europe, 30% of the population of the most northern countries will be dead from fire or from exposure. That is another 100 million people.”