“This is too much,” Clayton said. “I can’t think straight. I gotta get out of here.” He ran off in an instant.
“Hey!” Rob said.
“I’ll check in with you later!” he called out while turning down an alleyway and out of sight.
“Damn you, Clayton,” Rob said to himself. He approached the accident.
The driver of the Mercedes, a middle-aged man in a suit, got out and hurried to the rear of his car, where the crushed front-end of the station wagon smoked from its engine. The man slapped his forehead and crouched down to get a better look at the damage.
“Son of a bitch. This is a rental!” he shouted, kicking a newspaper stand.
An older, dazed man sat at the wheel of the Buick, pushing away the deployed airbag. The other man tapped against the window with a thick ring on his index finger.
“I hope you have insurance, old timer. I really do.”
Up the street, drivers exited their cars in defeat and opened their hoods, peering inside. Others took out their cell phones and seemed stunned to find them no longer working.
Rob felt his pockets for his cell phone and yanked it out. One touch of the screen gave him all the answers he needed. The screen was powerless and blank. He pressed the thin power button on its side and held it, but the phone did nothing.
The gray mist in the sky had faded, revealing a vibrant blue now returning. Rob looked around. The dead engines. The power outage. The blown transformer. There had to be a logical explanation for everything that had just occurred. And all the signs pointed to one explanation: an electromagnetic pulse. They’d been hit with an EMP.
Rob began walking back to his store with extra caution, his realization of the situation pushing him to action. A tense, uneasy feeling gathered in the air.
Dumbfounded by their inoperable cell phones, people pried the backs open and fiddled with their batteries. When that didn’t work, their frustration only increased and turned to anger.
Rob passed them as they stood locked-in on their phones.
“What the hell is wrong with this thing?” a man mumbled to himself. He stared into at his iPhone desperately.
“Is your phone working?” a woman asked her friend as they stepped out of a white Honda stopped in the middle of the street. “Mine is completely dead.”
Rob could see denial on many of their faces. The Mercedes man didn’t take the sudden loss of his own cell phone too well. He threw it onto the pavement as hard as he could, splitting it in half.
A group of teenagers walked by Rob with their cell phones up, tapping at their screens.
“Anyone getting this?” a lanky kid with a backwards hat and baggy jeans asked.
“My phone’s dead, dude. What is this shit?” a long-haired skater said.
“All of ours are. That’s what I’ve been trying to say,” said a girl with short blonde hair.
Rob walked past the teenagers and gave them a quick warning. “Your phones aren’t working because this area has been hit with an EMP.”
Their faces were clueless and rife with confusion.
“Electromagnetic pulse,” Rob said. At least I think that’s what it is. The best thing I would recommend is for all you kids to get home as—” He stopped. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be in school anyway?”
Their faces lit up with nervousness and they scattered just as two bicycle cops came from around the corner and pedaled down the sidewalk, observing everything, it seemed. They appeared calm and focused, both wearing bicycle helmets, Oakleys, belts with radios, their pistols, and badges.
“Officers, you must help us. We’re stranded!” a man in a wrinkled dress-shirt shouted as they passed.
“Make way, please,” said the officers. One of them had a mustache and a booming voice of authority.
“Why aren’t our cars working?” a woman in the crowd asked as the officers whizzed past her.
The other officer—clean-cut, round-faced, and identified on his badge as Larson, signaled for the crowd to step back. “Everyone just needs to remain calm. All we know is that we’re dealing with a temporary power outage.”
“Yeah, but our cars?” a frazzled man added. He held up his cell phone. “Our cell phones, too. How do you explain this?”
“We don’t know anything about that, sir. A transformer malfunction might have sent some crazy signals out there that may have disabled portable electronics as well.”
Rob walked away and toward the parking lot to find his car.
All the makings of a high-altitude nuclear EMP, he thought, looking around.
He approached his Chevy Impala in the corner and pulled his keys out, ready to give it the test. His remote key didn’t unlock the doors. After opening the door manually, he jumped behind the wheel and tried to start the engine. Nothing. Not even a flicker of light on the dashboard or a wheezing from the engine. His car was dead.
“Damn,” he thought.
Rob left the parking lot and looked around. Many people were still at their cars, some pushing them down the street in a last effort to keep moving. As many of those around him clutched their cell phones feverishly, Rob could see the panic in their eyes.
“Work, damn you, work!” one man shouted at his phone.
The collective desperation made Rob fearful of things to come, when suddenly a thought jostled his thinking.
Josh and Kelly.
He ran down the sidewalk and took a sharp left on Cedar Street. Pro-Survival was a few blocks down. Once at the store, he pulled his keys from his pocket, dangling them in the air, and then jammed the master key into the lock.
He flung the door open, ran in, and slammed it shut. The lights were off-the air conditioner too. He stayed low and moved to the front counter where the landline phone was. With the receiver to his ear, he heard nothing. It was as if someone had unplugged it. He tried his laptop. It was dead.
In his own way, he could understand the frustration of the people outside, and the panic they began to show in such a brief amount the time. Without his phone, he couldn’t contact Mila, and she couldn’t contact him. But he did have a GRMS handheld radio. He only hoped she would remember to have one on her as well.
Perhaps the range of the EMP strike was relatively small.
But Rob knew it was wishful thinking. From what he’d read, an electromagnetic pulse could span continent-sized areas if detonated at heights of two hundred feet. This was it—the moment he had been preparing for all his adult life.
There among all his prepper goods, he began to plan. If things got worse in town in the time it would take to bring power back to Nyack, they’d have to bug-out to the cabin. But he couldn’t get too ahead of himself.
First thing was to get his family together. He peeked out from behind the counter to the front store window. The coast was clear. He grabbed a bug-out bag from the display window, threw it over his shoulder and tried to leave, when someone began banging on the door, rattling the bars. Rob stooped back down, hiding as the banging persisted.
“Rob, come on, man. Let me in!”
He could recognize that voice anywhere. Bernie was back. But what did he want? Probably what everyone else wanted: answers.
Blackout
Having not slept long, Mila awoke on top of the covers in her darkened room. The blinds were closed. The room was stuffy, and when she looked to see what time it was, the alarm clock on her nightstand was off. Something felt strange and out of the ordinary.
The ceiling fan was off and so was the air conditioner. As she raised her head from the soft pillow, she wondered if she was still in some kind of dream. Sleeping during the day was disorienting enough. Even worse with the sounds of construction and lawn maintenance going on all day. Oddly enough, things were quiet, both in and outside the house.
She wanted to go back to sleep but was curious about the power being out. There was no storm. They’d paid the power bill. She looked around to see what time it was, but the alarm was off. She slowly got up to check her cell p
hone charging on the dresser across from the bed.
With a stretch, she walked over to the dresser tugging at her white nightgown, which had bunched around her legs. It was eerie how lifeless a room could be without electricity, the air so still and quiet.
She reached for her phone—still plugged in. Its screen was blank. The charging light wasn’t on. Thinking that she had maybe turned it off, Mila pressed and held the power button. Nothing happened. The phone had probably died, she thought, after the power went out, with no electricity to charge it. It made sense to her.
She glanced at her three-piece, queen-sized bed. The blankets were tossed around and hanging over the side. Something beyond her own tiredness wasn’t right, and she was going to find out what had happened.
She walked down the hall, past both Josh and Kelly’s rooms and into the living room. A subdued sunlight shone in through the thin drapes covering the window. She approached the front door, where the keypad for their home alarm system was. The digital screen was blank, which was odd, because the system was supposed to have a back-up power supply in the event of an outage. She pressed buttons on the keypad, just to see if anything would happen.
“Unbelievable,” she said under her breath.
She unlocked the front door and opened it, squinting as she looked outside. Their neighbors across the street, the Rockwells, didn’t look to be home. Their cars weren’t in the driveway, and the garage door was shut. The barks of neighborhood dogs echoed in the silence.
She grabbed her keys and a jacket and opened the door as sunlight hit her face. She walked to the driveway, blocking her eyes, to where her silver Kia Sportage was parked.
Her retired neighbor, Ken Blackwell, stood at the end of his driveway looking around in his straw hat, suspenders, and gloves. He was an old-fashioned man who spent most of his mornings in the backyard tending to his vegetable garden.
“Morning, Mila,” he said.
“Good morning, Ken,” Mila said, startled.
“How’s that night shift treatin’ you?” he asked.
“So far, so good,” she replied. She stuck the key in the door and opened it.
“Goin’ somewhere?” he asked.
She turned around and brushed her dark hair out of her face. “No. The power’s out, and I just wanted to check on something.”
“Lost power here, too,” Ken said. “Looks like the whole street is down.”
She got in, put the key in the ignition, and after a careful turn, all she heard was a sputtering click. She tried again. Nothing.
“I’m sure whatever it is, it’s temporary,” Ken said in his usual calm tone.
Distracted, Mila agreed with him and walked to the end of the driveway.
Houses on both sides of the street were quiet with little activity. Three houses down, she saw her neighbor, Allen, with his sleeves rolled up, messing with the engine of his Ford Taurus. She turned the other way and saw a garbage truck broken down in the middle of the road, its doors and hood open, with two garbage collectors examining the engine.
“You all right?” Ken asked.
“Yeah,” she said, returning to the house. She felt the warm hood of her car as she walked by, and thought of the other car they had in the garage, a red four-door 1979 Datsun: their bug-out vehicle. It was the vehicle they had for a number of reasons. It had low gas mileage, easy-to-repair-parts, and a low-key design. And most importantly, the lack of computerized components were susceptible to electromagnetic pulses. The more she began to add things up, the more resolute she became.
She waved to Ken and went back inside, straight to the kitchen in search of the Datsun keys. She opened their miscellaneous kitchen drawer and searched through tape, pens, markers, receipts, and finally discovered a key chain with some old keys on it. She snatched them up and went to the garage.
From what she understood about nuclear EMPs, they produced damaging electrical currents with the ability to disable and destroy power grids and electronic components. Upon impact, high-frequency surges travel to the ground and trigger electrical components to exceed their voltage.
A solar flare phenomenon was something else she had heard about. The sun regularly released broad flashes of powerful magnetic rays that, if they reached Earth, would damage electronics considerably. Whatever had happened, Mila needed to get moving.
She stopped at the living room window when she noticed a man walking by. He looked lost and out of place. His hair was short and disheveled, and his face looked dirty. He wore a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit and walked with a slight limp. A cigarette rested behind his left ear.
He glanced at the house and then kept walking. Mila backed away from the window, out of fear of being seen. After a moment passed, she took a quick look and didn’t see anyone. She raced through the living room toward the garage and opened the door, instinctively flipping the light switch. There wasn’t even a spark.
She walked inside the darkened garage and passed a large shelving unit on the side of the garage stocked with canned goods and emergency food kits. The dust-covered Datsun was right across from the shelves. Her hands clutched the door handled and pulled open the squeaky driver’s side door. She sat on the smooth vinyl seat as its rusty springs squeaked.
“OK, here we go,” she said, putting the key in the ignition.
With one turn, the engine sputtered to life. It choked and heaved as black exhaust blasted out of the tailpipe. Mila pressed her foot against the gas pedal as the dashboard lit up with a barrage of engine lights. Excitement gripped her heart.
But there was so much to be done, she didn’t even know where to start. If an EMP was at play, she knew the plan: they’d bug-out to the mountains. The most important thing, she knew at the time, was getting the kids.
She revved the engine while examining the fuel gauge. They were at half a tank. They would need more to drive to the city and back. She turned the ignition off. It was time to get Rob, get the kids, and move on to the bug-out phase. Surprised by how naturally the thoughts came to her, she felt in control. Whatever happened had happened. The question was, what was she going to do about it?
There was running water, still warm. Mila took a quick shower and got ready as fast as she could. She threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, put on a pair of sneakers, and opened their closet.
Inside was their biometric safe. She unlocked the safe and looked for her snub nose .38 Special revolver. It rested there next to their passports and an envelope containing five hundred dollars in cash. She grabbed the revolver, shut the safe, and looked around. There was something else.
She suddenly remembered the radios. Next to some boxes on the floor was a protective metal case with several high-frequency handheld radios and one emergency hand-crank radio inside. As a rule of thumb, Rob had usually kept the handhelds charged. She grabbed the case and fled the room, hoping there was nothing else she might have forgotten.
She opened the garage and tossed her purse inside the Datsun. Just out of the shower, with her hair tied back, she was already sweating. The thought of her next hospital shift crossed her mind. She had to warn her coworkers and make the sure the patients were okay. Rob. The kids. The hospital. It was too much to think about all at once.
“One thing at a time,” she told herself.
She knelt down next to the car and opened the radio case, seeing three 50-mile GMRS/FRS two-way radios, chargers, and the emergency chargers. Rob had a radio at the store, and she hoped he had it on him. Familiar with how to use it, she switched it on and stood up.
The bright sunlight shone into the garage. She walked away from the Datsun and looked around outside, relieved when she didn’t see anyone. It was time to hit the road.
“Rob. If you’re there, answer me.” She waited. Nothing but static came through. “Rob. Are you there? If you can hear me, let me know. I’m coming to the store. Wait on me.”
She turned to open the car door when a voice crackled on the other end.
“Mila!” Rob said.
“I’m here, Rob.”
“You’re awake? Listen to me. Something bad has happened. Just like we discussed. Looks like an EMP.”
“I know. I’ve got the Datsun packed and ready to go. My car won’t start. We’re going to have to drive into the city and get the kids.”
She waited for a response, but only static came through. “Rob?”
She walked back into the garage and next to the driver’s side door when she felt the presence of another person behind her. A shadow entered. She spun around, startled. Her heart nearly stopped when she saw the man, instantly recognizable and leering and smiling with crooked yellow teeth.
“Mila, are you there? I lost signal,” Rob’s voice said. “Hold on, I’m coming!”
She was frozen in place, unable to respond.
“How ya doing?” the man asked. She could smell his oil-stained mechanic’s jumpsuit from where he stood.
“Name’s Chet.” That much was evident by the name patch stitched on his chest.
“What do you want?”
Chet smiled wide and raised his arms to the top of the garage, holding onto the small ledge. He began to rock back-and-forth on his heels. She looked beyond the man and hoped to see Ken. The revolver was in her pocket and she wasn’t afraid to use it.
“My car broke down about a mile down the road that way,” Chet said, pointing in the direction he had come from. “Can’t find anyone to help me. I saw you were having a little car trouble yourself and thought that maybe we could help each other.”
“How exactly can we do that?” she asked.
“I’ll take a look at your Kia, and maybe you can give me a ride into town.”
“No thanks,” she said.
Chet examined the Datsun. “Going somewhere in this thing?”
Mila felt angry. Violated.
“I don’t really think that’s any of your business. I would advise that you call a tow truck.”
“Good idea,” Chet said. “Can I use your phone? My battery died.”
“I’m sorry. The power is out throughout the entire block. Our phone isn’t working.”
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