by Jack Mars
Gunner looked at his mom. She was very pretty, wearing a summer outfit of a T-shirt and jeans shorts. She had a big colorful canvas bag filled with a blanket, cheese and crackers, a Coke for Gunner, and a tiny bottle of red wine for herself, like the kind she sometimes got when they rode on airplanes.
She should be happy they were going to a movie, but she wasn’t. She was never happy anymore. She always looked sad, or angry. And Gunner knew it was because Dad wasn’t with them. But he was going to be soon. Maybe just for the movie, but maybe longer. Gunner was going to figure this out. He was going to get them all back together again, whether his parents liked it or not. He was doing it for their own good.
And then the lights on the train went out.
Suddenly, they were in total darkness. Even the lights they had been passing in the tunnel were gone. The train lurched violently. People shouted and fell all over each other. A few fell all the way to the floor, but not Gunner. He held on tightly and kept his balance. In an instant, it was going much slower than just a few seconds before. But it didn’t stop. Not yet. Gunner could feel it rolling along, slower and slower, gradually coming to a stop.
“Gunner? Gunner!” He could make out his Mom’s voice.
“I’m here, Mom. I’m okay.”
Her voice was raised, thin, frightened. “Honey, come closer.”
There was no way to come closer. There were too many people in the way. The dark was almost total. The only thing lit up were the phones all around him. They gave off a weird glow, like something from a movie about aliens visiting Earth.
Gunner glanced at his own phone. The internet was still on. “My phone still works,” he said, mostly to himself.
A tall black man stood high above him. He looked like a tree. “They run on a different system,” the man said. “The Metro power is out, but the phones are independent of that.”
Gunner stared down at his phone. Maybe there was some way to find out what was going on. As he looked, a text came through. It was from his dad.
Where are you?
Gunner glanced around. They were in a tunnel somewhere, under the ground. He had been thinking the train was about to enter their station, Smithsonian, but he wasn’t sure if that was right. He looked out the windows into the pitch blackness. It was dark on this train, but it was a lot darker in those tunnels.
Another text came in.
Gunner?
* * *
The motorman was not at fault.
He was awake, alert, and not under the influence of any substance except coffee. He was a little distracted—his wife was out of work, his oldest girl was entering her junior year in high school this year, and money for college was tight. Tight? Try nonexistent.
He sat in the train cab, pondering his troubles and watching the tracks and the tunnel ahead of him. The signals went by—green light, green light, green light…
He was on the approach to Smithsonian. He had done this route one million times. There was a track switch ahead here, one he needed to slow down for. He began to brake, barely glancing at his speed.
The entire route was in his body. It was all muscle memory.
Up ahead, the lights went out.
Suddenly, the entire tunnel was dark. His train lights were on, though. He could still see. He pressed on the brake harder. He’d better stop until he could radio the command center.
The train was not slowing down. He felt that in his body, too.
He glanced at his speed. Just over forty miles per hour. Out his front window, there was another train ahead, stopped on the tracks.
His own systems went dead now. Dead, but still moving. The train’s momentum carried it forward. There were no lights on in the cab. His headlights were out. He had no brakes.
He looked up again. The other train was RIGHT THERE.
* * *
Luke sprinted, the station just ahead.
The entryway to the station was crowded. Hundreds of people were streaming out onto the street and the sidewalks. Luke slowed. How was he going to push downstairs through these crowds?
He spotted two DC police officers. One was directing people to keep moving as they came out of the station. One stood in the street, white gloves on, diverting car traffic around the growing logjam of people. People milled around, some looking concerned, some laughing. There was no panic.
Then everything changed.
There was a sound. It came from deep below the Earth. It was like an explosion, only worse. Explosions only last a second or two. This sound went on and on, ear-splitting, shrieking, the rip and tear of metal grinding metal.
A moment later, smoke began to billow out of the subway entrance.
People were still streaming out, panicked now, a mob, a rampaging herd. The escalators were stopped, people trudging up both sides, falling all over each other. There was no way down. It was dark down there. A cloud continued to rise—not smoke, Luke realized, but soot, heavy air dirty with grit and grime.
He leapt onto the silver metal barrier between sides of the escalator. It was like a long, steep, crazy slide, except for the round discs protruding from it every ten feet—designed to stop people from using it for exactly that purpose.
He headed down, lost his footing almost immediately, fell and slid. He banged off one of the discs and gritted his teeth against the pain. He jumped up, started down again, fell again. He lay on his side and slid down. He pressed himself up at the next landing and started down again, lost his balance, and fell onto the crowd of people climbing the escalator. People fell backwards and Luke climbed over them.
He bulled his way down the escalators into the blackness—sliding, falling, rolling, knocking people over. People threw themselves to the floor when they saw him coming, gun and flashlight in hand. He walked across their backs.
It seemed to take forever to reach the bottom.
At the bottom, there were hundreds more people, pushing and shoving, trying to move through the turnstiles, trying to get upstairs and out. There was a police window here, no one inside it.
Luke pushed his way through the surging crowd. He shined the light in people’s faces. Blank, panic-stricken eyes appeared out of the darkness. They were trying to get away from something. He was trying to reach it. “Police!” he screamed. “Let me through! Out of the way! Police!”
A man in a jacket and tie, looking confused, his face bloodied: “They’re dying back there.”
Luke kept pushing through. Gunner, he thought. And then: Becca.
People were running towards him now, terrified faces. A man crashed into him, and they both tumbled to the concrete. Luke hit his head on the platform. His flashlight rolled away. He reached for it, and another person stepped on his arm. People were stepping on him, blindly running.
He grabbed the flashlight and lurched to his feet, running along with the momentum of the surging crowd. Everywhere, people were falling down and being stepped on. Twenty yards away, a woman fell. A man stopped to help her and was knocked down himself. More people tried to climb over them and fell. Within seconds, the pile became a writhing mass of human flesh, all being crushed by the next people in line.
This was his nightmare. Desperate people, injured, dying, and Luke helpless to stop it. He backed to the wall and pressed himself against it. The people streamed by him. He took a moment to catch his breath. Deep, slow huffs, one, two, three… four… five. He let the last one very slowly. He could still breathe—the air right here was still okay.
He moved forward along the wall now, stuck to it, glued to it. Where was it? Where was the nightmare? He inched forward, scanning with the flashlight.
He had no time.
He had to find Gunner and Becca. They would have come in on the Orange Line. The crowd thinned out the slightest amount. He abandoned the wall now and raced through the blackened tunnels, down empty escalators, jumping over the bodies of people who had fallen in the mad rush of people. Horrible images scrolled through his mind.
Gunner and
Becca at the bottom of a pile of dying people, people who were dead, people who were crushed by the crowds. Gunner with the blue face of someone who had died from oxygen deprivation.
Luke took a last flight of stairs, three at a time. He was on a train platform.
Dust and soot were still billowing out from a tunnel. Maybe fifty feet down from the station, the first car of a train was turned nearly sideways in the tunnel. The car was on fire. It was sandwiched between the walls, the silver steel of the car shredded apart like aluminum foil, its windows shattered. Flames and black smoke poured from it.
Luke raced through the acrid smoke toward the train. Here and there, bodies that had been thrown from the car littered the track. Luke flashed his light on them. He saw a woman without a head wearing a flowery summer dress. He saw a dead man in a suit impaled on an iron bar. Another man had been smashed against a concrete pillar. He was barely recognizable as human.
Luke kept going.
He reached the train, the flames crackling right near him. He ripped his shirt off and held it to his face. He squeezed past the flames and climbed up onto the wreckage of the car. He pushed through a long rectangular hole where a window had been. The ceiling had caved in. The support poles were bent and broken. More dead lay in piles in this car.
Suddenly, behind him, something exploded. Luke was knocked on his face by the force of it. The fire must have reached a tank or canister of flammable gas. Behind him was an inferno—the way back to the train platform. He crawled forward into the next car.
The car was over on its side. He dropped down into it. He still had his light.
The situation was not as bad here. People lay on the floor. People were slumped on seats. People cried. People moaned in pain. A pile of bodies were moving and writhing where the car had fallen over sideways. At least they were alive. But the flames were bare feet away—the entire train was about to catch fire.
“Gunner!” he screamed. “Gunner!”
“Dad?” someone said.
Luke flashed his light into the gloom. A small body was trapped under the writhing mass. Luke saw the terrified eyes of his son.
“Dad!”
Luke waded into the pile of people. He yanked them up one by one, pulling them off the pile and pushing them toward the back of the train, away from the fire. He felt the flames on his back.
“Run!” he screamed. “Run into the tunnel!”
He yanked more people up. Suddenly here was his child. He pulled him up and hugged him. He held the kid tight. Luke’s whole body was numb. He couldn’t think. He didn’t feel relief. He felt like he was going to pass out. They had to keep going.
“Gunner. Oh my God. Where’s your mother?”
“Here,” a small voice said.
She was still sitting in her seat. But the way the car had fallen, now she was on her back, her legs in the air. “Becca, you gotta get up. The fire is right behind me. Can you move?”
“I’m stuck.”
Luke made his way over to her and was stunned at the sight. There, atop her, were three mangled corpses, heavyset men who had died and had somehow fallen on her.
He reached down and with all his might yanked them off her, one at a time. Finally, she breathed deep, a new glint in her eyes, free.
She crawled around in a circle and worked her way on unsteady legs to a standing position on the seat. Her face was black with soot. “Oh my God,” she said.
In the first car, the flames gathered pace. Somewhere, another window shattered.
“Becca, I need you to take Gunner and get moving toward the back of the train. I have to get these people moving.”
She stared at him, eyes wide.
“Now, Becca! Move it!”
“Okay, Luke,” she said, with the eerie calm of someone in shock. “Okay.”
She took Gunner by the hand, and together they started moving toward the back of the train.
As the flames entered the car, Luke grabbed people. He picked them up off the floor. He pushed them. He slapped them. He punched them. He gripped them by the hair and launched them forward. He rained blows and kicks on them, herding them like animals away from the fire.
“Move it!” he screamed, his voice raw now from all the shouting, and the smoke.
Car to car, back through the train, away from the flames he drove them. He had an eerie thought as he did so: he was the first responder down here. And the only one.
On and on, even as the car filled with smoke, as the heat became unbearable, he saved them, one life at a time.
CHAPTER TWELVE
7:27 p.m.
United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC
Once upon a time, she had loved this view.
Susan had excused herself from the Situation Room and had retreated upstairs here to her study. She stood at the big bay window, staring out at the beautiful rolling lawns of the Naval Observatory campus. The afternoon sun was moving west, sinking very low now. The last of the daylight was beginning to fade.
Kat Lopez stood behind her. Susan felt her there, more than saw her. It was interesting how you could know a person just by the energy they brought with them into a room. Susan could always feel when her old chief-of-staff Richard Monk was in the room with her, and now she was starting to feel when Kat was here.
“Hi, Kat.”
“Susan? Are you okay?”
She didn’t turn around. “Yes.”
“I’ve got news.”
“Is it bad?”
“It’s not good.”
“Give it to me.”
“There have been several serious train crashes and derailments citywide.”
“Fatalities?” Susan said.
“Yes.”
“What are the numbers?”
“We don’t know yet,” Kat said. “Certainly in the hundreds. There have been at least a couple thousand injuries, from minor to life-threatening.”
Susan didn’t say anything, so Kat rolled on. “Kurt thinks we should record a statement with you that can be released to radio and television, calling for calm, and telling people that we are working to get to the bottom of it.”
Susan nodded. “That sounds like a good idea.”
“Should I set it up?” Kat said.
“Sure.”
When Kat left, Susan remained standing in the window. She barely moved. She watched the light change, then change again.
Pierre came in.
She turned to him. He was just himself, always Pierre, in shorts, a white T-shirt, and socks. The man had no airs at all.
“You look tired,” he said.
“One of those days, I guess.”
His face was concerned. “Do you want to come lie down for a little while?” He took her hand in his. “You need to take some downtime once in a while.”
“People have died in the subways,” she said. “I need to record a statement.”
He nodded. “I know. But you can’t save everyone. And if you don’t have some rest time, you won’t even be able to save yourself. Promise me that when the statement is done, you’ll come and rest.”
She looked up at him. For the first time in a long time, she felt ready to cry. She thought she had grown stronger, but this job was threatening to break her again.
“Okay,” she said. “I promise.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
8:35 a.m. (7:35 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
Taebaek Mountains – Gangwon Province, South Korea
The man was nearly dead.
His name was Kim Ki-nam. He was thirty-four years old, and a captain in the North Korean Army. He had been walking for days—he was no longer certain how many. At some point, he had become confused and lost track of time.
He could remember how very hungry he had been for the first day or two. The rations at the base had been poor recently, dwindling to almost nothing. When he left, his stomach was already almost empty. The country was gripped by famine again, the result of crop sabotage by spies from the United
States.
At this point, he had barely eaten anything in days. Even so, he no longer felt hungry, just tired. More tired than he had ever been. He had hiked, sometimes climbed, the region’s mountains, in a bid to avoid detection. It had worked, but he was subsisting on bugs and tree bark.
He drank from the streams he encountered, and the water seemed clean enough, though he’d had a serious bout with diarrhea… he couldn’t remember when. He had also been caught in a cold rainstorm yesterday or the day before. He spent that night curled in a ball, shivering. He had tried to cover himself over with leaves, but it did no good. Even now, his ragged uniform was still damp from the rain.
He was in bad shape.
Late one night, four or five (or maybe six, or seven?) days ago, he had deserted his post at a North Korean listening station. The place was supposed to be high security—after all, top secret encrypted transmissions from abroad came in there, as did intercepted communications from the south.
Even so, Kim had simply walked away. It was almost too easy. There was a hole in the perimeter fence in the woods at the edge of the installation. Everyone knew about that hole—it was where the prostitutes from the local villages entered the camp. It was important that the hole stay open. Not only to meet the men’s needs, but also to meet the needs of the girls.
The local people were starving. Everyone in the camp knew this, too, although it was forbidden to talk of it. The girls were becoming thinner and thinner. They only accepted payment in food now—you couldn’t eat the money, so in the villages, it wasn’t worth anything. Food was the most important currency there was. The girls didn’t even eat the food the soldiers gave them. They carried it home to their families in their purses.
Kim left the way the prostitutes came in—right through the hole in the fence. He skirted the nearest villages, and then he walked due south. His plan, if it could be called a plan, was to simply walk into South Korea.