by AJ Rose
“Nothing,” he muttered, scribbling a series of numbers in a specific order from what looked like a notes app in his phone.
Elliot watched for a moment, not knowing how to get Ash to open up to him. He’d thought they might have been getting somewhere, with the increase in physical touches between them and Ash’s admission in the car that afternoon about liking him, but he should have guessed seeing Ash lose his lunch and showing he was human would bring the asshole armor swinging back with a vengeance at some point. He tried another tack.
“Riley’s asleep. He kept asking me if we were going to have more mini hot dogs tomorrow. I guess he liked the Vienna sausages.” Frankly, Elliot was surprised the kid had crashed so early, but he supposed all their morning running around could have tired the boy out. It was only 8:30 p.m., an hour or so past sunset.
Ash grunted, capped the pen with the lid between his teeth, then pulled the cookie tin closer. Elliot craned his neck to look.
“Is that a Faraday cage?” he asked, leaning forward on his elbows. The tin was lined completely with cardboard, the telltale aluminum tape sticking out like a tongue from where Ash pulled it away to pry off the lid. The electronics it carried had been covered in several layers of foil and placed in individual plastic baggies. The phone, and what looked like a handheld GPS unit, had been unwrapped. The rest looked like a bunch of toaster pastries in size and shape. There was also a roll of cash, and a picture of a man kissing the cheek of a blushing girl of about nine while a little boy with blond hair and a huge smile clung monkey-like to his back. There was no mistaking Charlotte’s freckled nose, though the joyous face of the boy who could only be Ash was foreign.
“Yeah,” Ash confirmed. Faraday cages were designed to keep electronics safe in the event of a power surge of some kind, usually lightning striking a car, whose roll cage acted as a conductor to keep the electrical current from breaching the interior. It channeled the electricity around the outside skin of the cage, thus keeping the contents within—electronics and people alike—safe. This was usually why cars struck by lightning weren’t totally destroyed, not rubber tires, as most people thought.
Elliot knew it’d be pushing it to go pawing through the box to see what sorts of electronics Ash had saved, but judging by the shape of some of the items with stubby protuberances, he guessed there were hand-held two-way radios with short, fat antennas. The cookie tin wasn’t enormous, but it was a good twelve by twelve. Elliot frowned. GPS, radios, Ash’s phone….
“Wait a second.” His eyes went wide, and he sat back, stunned. “You knew this was coming, didn’t you? More than just your Uncle Marvin warning you ‘something’ could happen.” He made air quotes as he said it. “You knew what kind of something to watch for, didn’t you?”
Ash met his gaze, his blue eyes haunted. “I knew a little over twelve hours in advance. I got an encrypted email from my uncle that he’d seen some chatter on the deep web about the possibility of some kind of cyber attack on our infrastructure using EMP technology. He had no proof, but he told me specific devices to save, gave me this list of coordinates.” Ash held up the small notepad. “All I know is this is the path he wants us to take to get to him. I didn’t have a lot of time to ask questions.”
“Deep web?”
Ash sat back and crossed his arms. “The Internet as we know it is not the entire Internet. I don’t know much, but the deep web includes sites not indexed by search engines. Think of it like Google being an ocean-going fishing trawler dragging a net in its wake. That net may seem huge, but it only goes down several hundred feet. It’ll catch some fish, maybe a lot of fish. Enough that the fishermen are satisfied with the haul and don’t need to go any deeper. But there’s more ocean, far more, that the Google net can’t reach. What’s excluded from a search engine’s index is considered the deep web. Some of it is normal stuff, like office intranets, and some of it’s not. Some of it is peer-to-peer sharing, networking that can’t be traced by IP address, or whatever. I don’t know the technical way it works. It’s sort of a back-alley electronic world. Not everyone who uses it is a shady character, but there are plenty of places to hide for those who are. Uncle Marvin knows better than I do. He’s got some conspiracy friends he keeps in touch with, I guess. He honestly doesn’t really talk a lot about where his information comes from. I just know he’s been right often enough, when he tells me to watch out for something, I do what he says.”
“So he could have warned someone,” Elliot surmised, his temper rising.
“Who?” Ash snapped. “Who exactly could he have told with that small amount of time, that might have been able to investigate and stop whatever happened? And do you think for a minute Marvin is the only one who monitors the deep web? Fuck no. Our government probably has teams of computer nerds holed up in some concrete basement somewhere, watching those back alleys.”
“What are you boys arguing about now?” Charlotte asked, grabbing a bottle of beer from the fridge. Skimming off the cap, she took a drink and grimaced. “Ugh. Warm as piss.”
“Nothing,” Elliot muttered, not wanting to fight with Ash in front of his sister.
“Elliot thinks Marvin should have called for a conference in the Oval Office to tell the president about the coming power outage,” Ash sneered.
“Oh, sweetie,” Charlotte said, sitting down at the table. “No one takes Marvin seriously. He’s warned enough people about things that anyone in any position of authority doesn’t listen to him anymore. He’s just… crazy Uncle Marvin. I kind of wish Ash didn’t listen to him as much as he does.”
Elliot looked between them, distinctly uncomfortable. “But Ash just said he’s right often enough, he should be taken seriously.”
Charlotte shrugged. “I suppose you throw enough bullshit at a wall with a target on it, some of it’s going to hit the bulls-eye.”
Ash sighed, running his hands through his hair and pulling it off his face. “Charlotte. Knock it off. This time, Marvin was right. This time, I did a small amount of prep based on his word, and now we have working two-way radios, a short-wave radio, and a GPS unit. If I hadn’t listened to him, how would we get across the country if we have to take back roads?” He held up the devices as he said them, identifying the foil-covered lumps.
“Like people back in the ’50s did? With a map and a compass?” She drank her beer again and bumped her knuckles on top of Ash’s hand. “Not convinced, baby bro.”
Just then there was a knock at the door. Charlotte rose and answered it, and Elliot turned in his chair to see Brian Harding, his father’s vice president of IT and Security, step into the house.
Brian was a tall man, well over six feet, with a receding hairline he helped along by shaving his entire head and a stumpy little nose that seemed too small for his face. He had a nice smile, though, and goddamn, was Elliot glad to see him. By the way his worried expression melted away when Elliot stood, the feeling was mutual. Brian covered the distance to the kitchen in four strides and pulled Elliot into a bear hug.
“God, I looked for you everywhere, kid. You okay?”
“Yes,” Elliot said, the word muffled by Brian’s shoulder as he blinked against the sting in his eyes. For a second, he was a little kid again, and he was safe. Someone else he trusted completely could take over now, and he wouldn’t be overlooked or dismissed or considered an idiot anymore.
“I went to NYU to get you, since your schedule had you in chem lab, but your classmates said you left early. I checked your apartment, but saw no sign of you. Julian said you’d already been, and you were fine when you left with a friend, but he didn’t know where you were going, and you took the car. You’d never drive in ideal conditions, let alone the dark. I’ve been frantic, Elliot.” He pulled back, gripping Elliot’s biceps fiercely. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Brian was a surrogate father to Elliot, because his dad was away on business so much. He may have been a Davenport employee, but to Elliot, he was the man who’d tried to show him how to th
row a baseball, who’d introduced him to old black-and-white films, and hadn’t batted an eye when Elliot confessed to having a crush on Humphrey Bogart. He was the only person, aside from Julian, the doorman, and his wife, who knew Elliot swung that way. And of course, Ash.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, shrugging off the man’s hands. “It didn’t seem safe to stay in the city.”
“Well,” Brian said, seemingly remembering they weren’t by themselves and calming his accusatory tone. “It was actually a good you left when you did. The looting started in the middle of last night, and the police have their hands full. There aren’t enough cops to cover it, and there’s no backup from other cities because it’s like that everywhere. It was smart of you to get out, but I wish you’d have let me know somehow. Left word with Julian, so I could have gotten to you sooner.”
“That’s my fault,” Ash said, standing and offering his hand, introducing himself. “I wanted to get to my sister and was kind of pushy about getting out of town fast. I didn’t give Elliot much choice once he said we could take his car.”
“You drove?” Brian demanded, squinting at Elliot.
He shook his head. “Ash did.”
“Any trouble?” Brian bored a stare into him, and he knew what the man meant, which made him squirm.
“No, I’m fine.”
Satisfied, Brian nodded and turned to the others. “Sorry for the concerned uncle routine. With the Davenports out of the country, I feel responsible.” He gestured to the darkness beyond the windows. “You know what’s going on?”
“Yes,” Ash replied. “Mr. Davenport told us how bad it is and suggested we use your satellite phone to contact an army guy he knows to get to a military base or something.”
“No,” Brian all but snapped.
Elliot looked up sharply. “No?”
“I mean, they’ve already called in the National Guard back home, trying to organize people and contain the looters. But at the moment, it’s still chaos, and there’s no base to set up in just yet. They’re not letting people onto Fort Hamilton property who aren’t military personnel. Steven suggested we give them a couple days to get situated.”
“Pardon me, but we don’t actually have a couple of days.” Ash folded his arms. “You want my opinion, the rioting will get worse and more widespread when people realize how bad this is. Those big military trucks start rolling in, people are going to shit themselves, and there aren’t enough soldiers to cover this many displaced people. We wait around for them, we’ll be sitting ducks.”
“I agree,” Brian said.
“You do?” Elliot didn’t bother to hide his surprise.
“Oh, great,” Charlotte groused, snatching up her beer from the kitchen.
“Hold on a second.” Brian retrieved his bag from where he’d dropped it, firmly shutting the door behind him. “After I got the call from your dad about where you were, I called a friend of mine who lives in the UK to see if they had any news. Katherine said there’s very little information beyond what your dad had, but the president has released a statement, which contained less than what Steven told me. We do know this was some kind of terrorist attack. They haven’t confirmed who is responsible, but they say the attack was aimed at Washington, D.C., where the power grid failed first. There’s no damage to buildings or a big crater in the ground like a bomb, but it seems the catastrophic failures were more concentrated there than anywhere. Planes fell out of the sky, cars careened off roads and into each other, and none of the city’s backup systems work. No generators, no hospitals, no nothing.”
The impact of those mental images left the group peering at each other uneasily. Ash rubbed his chest as though he had heartburn, and a wave of dizziness overtook Elliot.
“I have to sit down,” he said, his voice trembling.
Oh god, please not now.
He sat on the living room couch just as it hit him. Brian immediately crouched at his feet.
“Did you take your medicine?”
Elliot registered someone speaking to him, but the words had no meaning. Paralysis struck, and he was trapped in his own body, could see and hear even if nothing made sense, and his awareness shorted out as Brian laid him on his side.
Next thing he knew, Brian was in his face. “Back with us, El?”
He blinked, and his comprehension returned in increments. The shadowy figures of Ash, Charlotte, and Russ ringed Brian’s back, and Elliot groaned. They’d seen it. Dammit. Well, at least Riley hadn’t been a witness, too. Elliot felt wooden and achy at the same time.
“How bad?” he rasped.
“A minute. Not the worst. Have you been having little ones lately?”
“This morning.” His voice cracked, and he tried to sit up, his head pounding. He winced.
“Don’t overdo it,” Brian admonished kindly, pressing him to the cushions. “Need a drink?”
“Has he been having little what?” Ash demanded.
“Seizures,” Brian answered, standing and grimacing when one of his knees popped. “Have you got water? He needs to take his meds.” He turned to Elliot. “Where are your pills?”
Elliot’s arm felt like lead, so he rolled his eyes toward the hallway. “Gym bag.”
Brian moved off, and Charlotte followed. “I’ll get it. It’s in my son’s room, and he’s asleep.”
Ash disappeared to the kitchen, returning with Elliot’s half-drunk bottle of water from their cobbled together dinner of canned veggies and sausages. It was his turn to kneel before Elliot, whose head rested on a throw pillow at an angle that stretched his neck. It felt good, and was about the only thing on his body that did.
“You had one of those this morning? When? You were with me the entire day.”
Elliot grunted a negative sound, opened his mouth to answer, but the words were jumbled in his thoughts, and he wasn’t sure if the sounds he made were comprehensible. Apparently not, because when Brian returned with a pill bottle, he answered for Elliot.
“If he was functional the rest of the day, it had to have been an absence seizure. He’d have only gone blank for a few seconds, like he was staring into space.”
“At the park,” Charlotte muttered.
“Open up,” Brian instructed, dropping a pill into his mouth and dribbling a little water in after it. “Rest now.” Brian’s cool hand smoothed the hair off his forehead. “Have you got his iPod or phone somewhere? The music helps relax him.”
“iPod in his car, I think. His phone’s fried.” Ash strode to the door, digging Elliot’s keys from his pocket. A few minutes later, he knelt before the couch again, one earbud in his ear so he could adjust the volume. With a satisfied nod, he pushed the earbuds into Elliot’s ears and pressed play. The first acapella strains of Coal War by Joshua James curled into Elliot’s brain, and that jittery feeling he’d had all day lessened. It was the last thing Elliot knew as his eyelids drooped and he gave in to the fatigue.
* * *
* * *
“Fucking hell,” Ash cursed, pacing the kitchen, his mess on the table forgotten. “Elliot’s epileptic?”
Brian eyed him warily. “Yes. It’s under control with medication, but stress makes it worse, and if any situation qualifies as stressful, it’s being roped into letting someone drive him hours from his home in a national emergency without asking if there was a reason he shouldn’t.”
“Wait a minute,” Ash blustered. “He could have said he was sick. We went to his place so he could get a few things. Might have been a good time to mention medication required to help him survive in the best of circumstances.” He knew he sounded uncaring, but he was about at his limit for scary things, and the image of Elliot convulsing on the couch made his stomach roll with unease. What else didn’t he know about the guy he’d been having sex with for months?
“He’s not sick,” Brian said, and his patience pushed every irritated button Ash had. “He’s got a chronic condition controlled with medicine. It’s not like he’s contagious, and as long as he ke
eps himself as calm as he can under the circumstances, takes his meds on time, and tells us if he’s feeling off, he’ll be just fine.”
“Bullshit,” Ash all but exploded, albeit as quietly as he could to keep from waking Elliot in the next room. “What happens when his meds run out? Think we’re just going to toddle to a pharmacy drive-thru for a refill? Goddammit.” The idea of Elliot running out of medication made his blood go cold.
Even in the marginal flicker thrown around by the citronella candles and the LED circle of the camping lantern on the table, Brian visibly paled.
“Maybe he would be better off with the army,” Ash muttered, running his fingers through his hair. “They’d at least have trained medical people to help him.”
“I highly doubt it,” Brian intoned, leaning on the counter with his palms flat, hunching his shoulders. “Elliot’s not exactly butch, if you haven’t noticed. He’s not a wimp like people think. That kid’s tougher than anyone gives him credit for. But he’s generally more stressed around… how should I put this without insulting him?” He cast about for the kindest words. “He’s somewhat easily intimidated, let’s say. And guys strolling around in fatigues with guns and stern faces are guaranteed to redline his stress meter, and stress is one of his seizure triggers.”
“So what are you suggesting?” Ash asked, unable to hide his fear anymore.
“That he stay with you. Obviously he feels safe enough to have come with you in the first place, or he wouldn’t have offered to let you use his car. His dad said go to the army, but I’m telling you, that’s not what’s best for Elliot.”
“Well, I’m certainly not sticking around here. I’m trying to get my sister and her kid to leave for the West as soon as we can, before most people realize that’s their best bet, too. I can’t guarantee Elliot’s safety on a cross-country trek, especially not with his condition. How is it he’s better off with me when I know next to nothing about epilepsy?”