The F-22 pilot sank the last thousand feet to the trees below limp and unaware of the violent impact rushing toward him.
Elsewhere on the ground, fifteen hundred miles east, a middle-aged man in a powerful suit-and-tie combo was yelling for the fourth time at his teenaged son.
“Turn off your phone, or it will be turned off for you! And come in here, now. Your mother and I have something important to discuss with you.”
The boy ignored his father—actually his stepfather, who he had never grown to like—and remained on the deck of their million-dollar cabin in the hills of upstate New York, texting away as if his life depended on it.
The boy’s mother, shockingly blonde and dressed as well as her husband, sat on a couch inside. She nervously tapped her foot on the carpet and stared off toward the fireplace.
A minute later the boy walked in, staring at his phone in consternation. “Reception’s totally gone now. I hate this cabin.” He tossed the six-hundred dollar device onto the couch and opened up a laptop he’d left on the coffee table. His father, smiling with grim satisfaction now, watched as the boy tried to load an internet browsing window but got nothing. “You’ve got to be kidding. What, is the entire internet broken or something?”
The boy had been half-joking, but the look on his stepfather’s face said the joke was on him.
“That laptop, and your phone, will not be of much use any more,” the man said with more composure than before, and an unpleasant authoritarian tone added in. “Will you please take a seat by your mother so we can discuss what the next few months hold for our little family?”
The boy unhappily complied, realizing that for once his stepfather might have some information to share that he would find relevant.
“Our country is undergoing a major change today,” the man began. His wife still wouldn’t look up, but the kid was staring at him, trying to gauge the scope of what he was hearing. Sheltered and privileged, the boy had no concept of politics or power, no way to understand what was coming. But the man would try to explain anyway.
“I am confident it is a necessary and right change. But it will not be easy, or quick or painless. Many of the people you know will change as things fall apart around them. They will not understand what is happening, and may react poorly. Some will go away, some might even try to turn on us. So we need to weather the next few weeks here in the cabin.”
“Is that what all the food and water is for?” the boy asked. “The stuff you had delivered and stored in the basement?”
The man nodded. “There’s more than enough here to keep us healthy and safe for the duration. Within a few weeks, three or four months at most, I hope things will have progressed enough that you two can join me again.”
The woman looked sharply over at her husband, but it was the boy who spoke. “Wait, you’re leaving us here? Alone in the cabin, for four months? What are we supposed to do?”
“I’ll be here for the next few weeks,” the man explained. “But after that I will be needed elsewhere. There will be people looking to me to restore order and set things up for a brighter, better-ordered future. Just in case it doesn’t all go smoothly, I’d like you two to remain here where you’ll be safe.”
“Why wouldn’t we be safe in town?” the woman asked. “Are you expecting an attack or an invasion of some kind? I thought the idea was to promote peace and order.”
The man nodded. “Of course it is. But to get there, to arrive at a true and lasting peace, there are all kinds of problematic elements that will have to be put down, eliminated from the country. That process could get ugly. Here in our cabin, we’ll miss all the bad parts, and when it’s time we’ll emerge into a utopia that’s waiting to welcome us with open arms. No more gun crimes, no more squabbling of rich versus poor, no more wild economic swings. We’ll all be happier and more effective.”
The boy didn’t catch most of what the man was implying. He sank deeper into the couch and folded his arms. “I don’t want to be more effective. I want to hang out with my friends from school. And this feels like prison.”
“It’s only a prison if you approach it with that attitude,” the man said. “Anyway, it’s for your own good, and there’s no going back.”
The woman was barely holding back tears now. “But couldn’t we spend this time somewhere a little closer to our friends and neighbors? I’m sure it will be safe in the nice parts of town. We could hire a security guard and—”
“You don’t understand how this sort of thing works,” the man said, interrupting his wife and speaking quickly to overrule her inane suggestions. “What we’re talking about essentially amounts to an insurrection, a time of revolution. You can’t bake a cake without breaking some eggs.”
“Revolution? Are you talking about some kind of war?” the boy asked.
The man regarded him coolly. “I hope it doesn’t come to that. But you should know that there are many people in this country that have made themselves quite at home with lawlessness, hatred, and discord. So yes, it may become violent in some regions. It should be over quickly, if all goes well, and we’ll be stronger for it in the end.”
The woman shook her head and hid her eyes in her hand. The boy glared harder at his stepfather.
“This is insane. How come you know about all this, you’re okay with it, but my friends are all clueless and stuck out there somewhere that might not be safe?”
The man shrugged. “Eggs will be broken. It’s unavoidable, and I refuse to be held hostage any longer by the populations that refuse to compromise in order to maintain an acceptable level of harmony and progress in this nation.”
The boy took a moment to process that. Finally he came to the realization that his stepfather was condoning loss of life for anyone who didn’t have a cabin in the hills and the foreknowledge to be there already. “You’re insane! I can’t believe this. Are you supposed to be the king when this is all over, is that where this is going? I always knew you were on a power-trip!”
The man stepped forward and slapped the boy across the face. He waited a moment for the boy to react, and for the almost equally pained expression on the woman’s face to fade. Then he smiled coldly.
“You will learn some lessons, starting now. That’s your first one. Don’t make me repeat it. And do not—I repeat, do not—become a liability to me. That is not a position you want to be in right now, and you are getting very close to it. I will not give you another warning!”
In downtown Denver, Tara Leonhardt was standing at the second-story window of her office building, staring out at the ruin that had been a perfectly good cityscape a few hours earlier. Now there were raging fires where downed aircraft had erupted in apocalyptic fireballs, and people were running in the streets. A series of popping sounds echoed in the distance, but she didn’t know what was causing them. Perhaps some fireworks set off by the blaze that was filling the streets with smoke.
Tara was in shock. She was twenty-one years old, blonde, prettier than most, and as clever and funny as any of her coworkers and roommates. She wore clothes that flattered her slender, slightly athletic figure, and she wore the right makeup and jewelry. She even had a late-model iPhone which she used to keep up some very popular and lively social media accounts. But now none of that seemed to matter much. Real life was overshadowing all of it, revealing it as irrelevant and worthless.
She watched the destruction in the city with relentless horror encroaching on her heart, and kept thinking there must be some way to undo what she was seeing, to rewind and get out of this bad dream she had become entangled in. She had left the backwoods of Montana and come to Denver looking for money, love, and adventure, not necessarily in that order. Now that she was having her first brush with adventure’s scary side, she wanted nothing to do with it. And the money and love were both proving elusive. Why was she even here?
Most of the traffic she could see from her window was completely stopped, but then she saw a little red car streaking by, its driver obviously di
straught and desperate to get somewhere. Suddenly a man lurched out from the sidewalk, waving his arms at the car and trying to get it to stop. The driver swerved to avoid the man and plowed head-on into the back of a minivan stopped in an intersection. Tara looked away.
“This is crazy,” she muttered. “This can’t be happening.”
It was dark in the office; not even the emergency exit signs were lit. When Tara’s boss, James, came up behind her it startled her so badly she screamed.
“Sorry, he said. “I was just going to say that you’d better get home. We don’t know when the power will come back on, and anyway those fires could spread. We’re closing up shop for the day.”
Tara nodded and grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair.
James turned to go. “I’d, uh, offer you a ride, but it looks like most people’s cars aren’t working. Maybe the buses?” He didn’t sound at all confident, but Tara nodded again.
“See you tomorrow.”
As they left the building to join the others congregating on the sidewalk and exchanging bewildered conjecture about what was going on, Tara remembered she had left her keys in her desk. James held the door while she ran back up to the office to get them.
While she was fumbling through the dim office, a series of loud pops sounded out on the street, right where she had come from moments earlier. They were like the ones she had heard earlier and assumed to be fireworks, but had more punch, like a crack-crack-bang instead of the hiss-pop of a firework. And they were accompanied by terrified screams.
Her coworkers were screaming. Something terrible was going on out there, and she had only missed it because of her keys. Tara fought to keep her grip on reality, taking deep breaths and forcing herself to focus on what was happening around her rather than fiddle with the phone in her pocket, which didn’t have any reception.
She finally found the ring of keys, turned to go back out of the office, and then realized how dangerous that might be. Instead, she crept softly to another window and tried to get a view of what was going on down below. She couldn’t see the front of the office where James and the others had congregated, but she could see a man walking down the street toward them. He was holding a rifle up to his shoulder and was aiming it at the spot where she had left her coworkers. Flashes were coming from the gun with each pop that rattled the window. The man’s face was obscured by a red bandana, and he just walked boldly down the street. No one was trying to stop him.
Realizing the true nature of what she was witnessing and the impact it was likely to have on her in the immediate future, Tara felt the creeping sense of dread finally overwhelm her with sheer terror. She began to weep uncontrollably as she groped through the darkened office.
It had only taken a few seconds in reality, but time seemed to have slowed considerably when the power went out and the falling-jet explosions rocked the city. Now it all dawned fully upon her: Denver was in the grip of the worst terrorist attack the nation had ever seen, worse than 9/11. There were shooters in the streets as well as airliners crashing into buildings, and power outages, and traffic snarls.
It briefly occurred to Tara that she might be witnessing the end of the world. She slumped down against the interior brick wall of the office, out of sight from the window, and crouched there in the darkness hoping no one would come up the stairs.
For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to feel truly afraid.
Chapter 3: In the Dark
Walt pulled a tire-sized coil of fencing wire from the bed of his truck and shoved his biggest pair of pliers into the pocket of his coat. Liam was already at the fence, kicking the section that had been split open by the two rebellious cattle the day before.
“Hey, don’t make it worse than it already is,” Walt admonished.
“If it’s that weak, we should just tear it down and start over,” Liam said. “Look, this post is crumbling on the bottom.”
Walt set down the wire and inspected the post in question. “No,” he decided, “it’ll be fine. That’s just surface damage. The core should be fine, and anyway I didn’t bring the post hole digger out here. We’ll wire it together.”
His skinny, dark-haired son, who was already an inch taller than Walt, shrugged. It wouldn’t be him rounding up stray cattle in the future; he didn’t plan on living at home for much longer.
They worked for half an hour, binding the horizontal fence slats to the good post on the other side of the point of failure. The morning sun was high in the sky when they finished.
“All right, that should do ‘er. Let’s get back to the sheds.”
“Uh, Mom thinks I should get a couple of those college applications done today, Dad.”
Walt looked his son in the eyes to see if he was weaseling out for a good cause, or just bluffing. He decided the application project was real, even if his eighteen year-old was showing signs of a serious lack of commitment to the hard ranch work. “All right. When you’re done, come find me. You got to earn your keep around here somehow.”
Liam grimaced. He knew his father was mostly joking, but there was an uncomfortable truth behind the words. He had graduated from high school the previous spring, and his parents expected him to either get into college, get a job, or take his place getting a full share of the work done each day.
They put their supplies back in the truck and climbed in. Walt quickly noticed that something was off, but couldn’t put his finger on exactly what.
When he turned the key, he suddenly realized what it was. The little overhead light that usually came on when he opened the door was dark, and even though he’d left the key in the ignition, there was none of the usual beeping.
The key did no good. He turned it again and again without getting so much as a click from the starter.
Liam rolled his eyes. “You should have gotten that new Silverado I showed you online.”
“You mean the thirty-thousand dollar one with the deluxe stereo?” Walt asked, laying the sarcasm on thick. “Gee, you’re right. Then you could have helped me make the payments on it for the next ten years.” He got out and opened up the hood. Liam sauntered over to watch, but stood back out of the way.
Twenty-five minutes later Walt declared the truck immovable, and they began to walk back to the house. The clouds from the previous night’s showers had thinned to a light gray cover, and the air was pleasantly cool. Walt wasn’t in much of a mood to talk, but knew that opportunities for one-on-one discussion with his son were fleeting, so he asked Liam how he was feeling about his future, about college and work and his various interests and aspirations, and they chatted as they walked.
When they reached the house, Sarah met them at the door. They could both tell by the look on her face that she was upset.
“Tara called back a little bit ago, but the power went out right as I picked up, and the phone died. It hasn’t come back on.”
Walt hurried up the porch steps. “Does the cell phone still work?” he asked. They shared a cheap cellular phone between the family, whoever was leaving the ranch taking it with them so they could call home from wherever they were. Liam and Amy used it a lot more than Walt or Sarah did.
Walt’s wife shook her head and pulled the little phone from the pocket of her jeans. “It turns on, but there’s no reception. Just says ‘Network Status Unknown’ and won’t put a call through.”
Liam took the phone from her and played with it while Walt went to check the fuse box in the basement. He had a bad feeling about this power outage coinciding with his truck failing. Taking a small flashlight from the kitchen drawer and making sure that it, at least, worked, he went downstairs and found his way to the corner where the fuse box was set into the wall.
His bad feeling was confirmed by what he found in the basement; there was nothing wrong with the house’s electrical system. There was just no juice coming in from the line at the county road.
Back upstairs, Liam was sitting on the couch still fiddling with the phone. “Outage
must be pretty widespread if the cellular network is down,” he muttered. ”This has never happened before!”
Sarah looked to Walt, worry in her eyes. “Liam says you had to walk back. What’s wrong with the truck?”
“I don’t know. Where are the girls?”
“They went to town this morning. They’re still there.”
“Did they take your car?” Walt was starting to feel the same level of concern his wife was. Amy had just learned to drive, but he wasn’t sure she would be capable of navigating home safely without traffic lights.
“No, they biked it. My car’s not running at the moment, remember? You were supposed to work on it today. And yesterday.”
“All right. I’m going to go out and check a few things,” Walt replied. He handed the flashlight to his wife and went out to the barn.
An hour later he came back inside. Sarah was fixing some sandwiches for them. “I’m making chicken salad from last night’s leftovers,” she told Walt. “Just in case this outage lasts more than a few hours.”
“Well, keep the fridge shut as much as you can,” he said. “There’s no telling how long it will last. I don’t like being without a car and phones.”
He sat down next to Liam and conversed in low tones. “Any luck, son?”
Liam had a few other electronics on the couch with him, and he shook his head as he gestured to them. “The stuff with batteries still turns on just like you’d expect. My watch and the wall clock are fine. But my little radio just gets static. Is there some kind of atmospheric disturbance?”
Walt shrugged his shoulders. “Just a few clouds left over from the storm. The tractor in the barn starts up okay, but that old car you and mom share won’t respond at all, no matter what I do to it.”
Liam smirked. “That thing only starts up a quarter of the time anyway. I’ve been trying to tell you we needed a new one that wasn’t manufactured in the nineteen-twenties.”
Walt didn’t smile. “I fussed with it for twenty minutes, and it never would turn over. But there was enough battery left to turn the radio on. Nothing but static, like you said.”
Lionhearts (Denver Burning Book 5) Page 2