by Roger Hayden
Rob waved. “I’m not a journalist, but I’ll look into it. Fair enough?”
“Sure, sure,” Bernie said. “No hard feelings. I really do have to get to the courthouse.”
“Good luck,” Rob said. Bernie waved back and left the store. Everything went quiet again except for the light rock playing softly and the hum of the air conditioner. His edit screen was open, and he had only typed the title of his economy post. He deleted it and instead added: “A Coming War with Russia?”
The landline office phone suddenly rang near the cash register. Another interruption. Ron got off his stool and picked up the phone by its fourth ring.
“Pro-Survival. Your one-stop shop for when disaster strikes.”
There was a slight static on the line then a man’s voice talking loudly. He had a Long Island accent and sounded like he was driving. He wanted a tent.
“Yes sir, we have plenty of tents. What size are you looking for?”
“A big one. Me and the family are looking to do some camping on the Hudson this weekend.”
Rob looked around the store, holding the phone to his ear. “Um. Yes. We have two-to-four-person tents.”
The conversation went on and Rob made his first sale of the day. The man didn’t seem concerned with price, he just wanted it set aside for him for the weekend. He thanked Rob and quickly got off the phone.
Just as Rob went back to his computer, Mr. Clayton, his landlord, walked in unexpectedly. Seeing him first thing in the morning wasn’t a good sign.
“Mr. Clayton. Nice to see you this morning.”
Clayton turned to him and tipped his ball cap. He was an older man, mid-fifties with bronze skin and a slight paunch under his blue polo shirt, which he wore tucked into his brown slacks. Rob hadn’t seen him in over a month.
“Good morning, Rob. Sorry for the intrusion,” Clayton said, approaching him.
“No problem. What brings you here?” Rob said.
Clayton walked closer and rested his elbows on top of the glass display counter of hunting knives, multi-tools, and paracord bracelets.
“It’s such a nice day outside. How about we take a quick walk?”
Rob gave his landlord a funny look. “You mind telling me what this is about?”
Clayton seemed defensive. “Nothing in particular. I just wanted to talk to you and get some fresh air at the same time. Is that so wrong?”
Rob narrowed his eyes. “I’m trying to run a business here. What is it?”
“Just a brief walk outside. Please?” Clayton said. He then turned and glanced around. “By the looks of it, I’d say you could spare about five minutes.”
Frustrated, Rob bit his tongue. He wanted to tell Clayton to get the hell out of his store, but he wasn’t up for a fight.
“Fine. Five minutes. And that’s it.”
He grabbed his keys and followed Clayton outside, where a puffy, cloud-filled blue sky awaited. He closed the entrance door and locked it.
They walked along the sidewalk, past the bookstore and a mechanic shop, where sounds of drilling echoed down the street. Clayton, it seemed, finally felt it appropriate to reveal the nature of his visit after Rob asked him again.
“I insisted on this walk because I wanted to show you something, Rob. Look around you.” Clayton paused. “This area is changing.”
Rob scanned the streets. It was the same thing he saw every day. Cars passing by. People walking by store windows. Bicyclists. Dog walkers. A family out for a stroll.
“You wouldn’t know it by looking around, but it’s a shaky market out there now,” Clayton said. He leaned in closer, almost in confidence. “Now you don’t have to answer this, but I was just curious how business was going.”
Rob took a step back. “Business is doing fine, thank you.”
Clayton continued. “I understand that, but you might want ask yourself if this location serves your purposes anymore.”
Rob crossed his arms. “Why are you giving me business advice? All you should be concerned about is if I make my rent on time.” Rob stepped closer, nearing Clayton’s face. “In fact, if I want to train pigeons in there all day, it’s none of your business as long as I have your rent.”
Clayton nodded. “I understand, Rob. Just hear me out for a second here. What I’m saying is that property taxes are increasing. Damn city council can’t seem to get enough revenue. You may want to think about that.”
Rob huffed and waited for Clayton to get to the point.
“I’ve got an offer on the rental space,” he revealed. “Twice what you’re paying. And I’m afraid that when your lease is up in a few months, I’m gonna have to go with the offer or ask you to match them.”
Rob couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I knew it,” he said. “You could have told me this in the shop and avoided all this nonsense.”
“I’m only trying to give you a fair assessment of the situation here. You have to understand where I’m coming from.”
Rob tilted his head back and then stared Clayton down. “Who is making this offer? That’s what I want to know.”
“That’s not important.”
“Just tell me.”
Clayton’s eyes glanced downward then back up. “A bistro.”
Rob was taken aback. He slapped his forehead and laughed. “A bistro?”
“Beth’s Downtown Bistro. They run a variety of chains in the northeast.”
“This is just rich, Clayton. I guess I’m not surprised.”
“I’d be happy to let you renew the lease.”
“For twice what I’m paying now,” Rob said.
“Yes. I’m sorry, but I’m trying to pay off a mortgage here. Can you tell me that you have the money to buy?”
Rob stared back, unresponsive.
“You can’t, can you?” Clayton said.
Rob stopped shifting and balled his fist. Clayton could sense the building tension.
Suddenly a giant, white flash burst into the sky, knocking them down on the ground as if they’d been hit by lightning. The transformer on a power line post exploded into sparks. The sky went gray. Then, so it seemed, there was a deafening silence throughout the street. Other people had fallen to the ground as well, still shielding their faces from the stunning, bright flash.
Clayton was on his knees holding his head after hitting it on the sidewalk, his hat tossed aside, revealing a brown comb over in disarray.
Rob slowly rose from the ground, dazed. “What the hell was that?”
EMP on a Monday Morning
Vehicles swerved haphazardly in both directions on the four-lane street near where Rob and Clayton stood. A white station wagon slammed into the back of a silver Mercedes, causing a loud, chain-reaction crash. Glass and plastic burst onto the pavement. A tire blowout sounded in the distance. Cars swerved, skidding across the road. Their tires screeched as some pulled toward the sidewalk, hitting the curb and slowing to a halt.
More crashes echoed from blocks away. Cars rolled by, engines silent, with perplexed drivers jerking their steering wheels and stomping on unresponsive gas pedals. Intersections had non-functioning traffic lights.
For a moment, the chaos on the road went completely unnoticed by Rob and his landlord.
“You hear that?” Clayton asked as Rob helped him up.
“Hear what?” Rob asked. All he heard were groups of people on the street shouting, calling for help, and staring at their cell phones, mystified.
“A ringing. Like a high-pitched tone,” Clayton answered, looking around.
Rob didn’t hear any kind of tone, but he did see tiny floaters in front of his eyes, as if someone had just flashed a spotlight in his face.
Clayton held the back of his balding head as he picked up his hat from the ground. “Got a hell of a bump,” he said. For a moment, they just stood there, trying to get themselves together while becoming painfully aware of what had just happened around them.
“What was that, lightning?” Clayton asked.
Rob lo
oked up. The sky had gone from blue to gray in an instant, but something wasn’t right. This had been no ordinary storm or lightning strike.
“Do you see any rain clouds? Do you hear any thunder?” he asked.
Clayton looked around. There was a faint rumbling in the distance, no clear signs of a storm, but something was definitely out of the ordinary. “Look, uh. Maybe we can talk about this later, Rob. I don’t think it’s safe to be out here.”
Rob grabbed his arm. “Wait.”
An unsettling and eerie silence permeated the air. “That was no ordinary flash of lightning,” Rob continued. “That was an explosion.”
Clayton looked around, disoriented. A couple up ahead of them were holding their heads and stumbling around in a daze.
“What do you mean, like a plane or something?”
“I don’t know just yet, but I think we do need to find cover.”
Clayton pulled out his cell phone and tried to make a call. He held it out and looked at its blank screen. “Huh? Phone’s dead.” He turned to Rob. “You don’t mind if I make a phone call in your store for a minute do you?”
The power was out on the entire block. Shops and cafés were dark inside; the lights of their signs were off. Customers and employees alike walked outside, uncertain of what had happened.
Vehicles were at a standstill. Not a single engine was running. Drivers repeatedly turned their ignition switches to no avail.
Having seen enough, Rob headed back to his store with Clayton following. They passed a rear collision that had just occurred. Smoke rose from the car that had plowed into the back of another.
“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 phone 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.