A groggy man answered. “Hey, Dez. This is Pat. Where are you?”
“I told you last night, I’m just over the hill. Is the fire on your side?”
It took him a whole five seconds to answer. When he finally came back, his words were slightly slurred. “Oh, right. You wanted to get away from us drunkards. Nothing going on here. You okay?”
“No, I’m not okay, thanks for asking,” she sassed. “Is anyone missing from camp?”
Patrick hesitated again. “You are.”
“Shit! Is anyone else gone? I thought someone was just here. I need to know, Pat. Look around!”
There was a sound that might have been the microphone tipping over, but then the line went silent. She prayed he was checking on the team to be sure they were all there. She also begged fate to give her the one night in history where none of the students paired off.
Another loud crack belted out from the valley. She would bet anything the fire was already engulfing hectares of scrub.
It surprised her how fast Patrick came back on. “All good here. No empties. Everyone is here but you.”
She let out a sigh of relief. Tracking down a drunk university student inside a burning national park was not her idea of animal research.
“Good. Now listen. I’m coming over the top. You might need to call triple zero to get some firefighters in here. Get a drone in the sky to see how big it is.”
The man on the other end snickered. “How big what is?”
“Are you still pissed drunk?”
“How dare you!” Patrick sounded like he’d put the radio mic in his mouth.
“Get someone sober on the line!”
I’ll have to do this myself.
The base camp was just over the hundred-meter-high ridge at her back. She left the uni kids as well as the other profs because she didn’t like to swim in alcohol each night, but she didn’t hold it against them. It gave her a chance to get out alone and sleep with nature, which was the true love of her life.
A large burning leaf floated down as she grabbed her backpack and shoved her arms through the straps. A thick column of smoke followed.
She eyed the hammock and little camp chair she had carried in last night, but there was no more time.
“Cut your losses, woman.”
She started up the rocky escarpment between her and the team.
European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), Switzerland
“Will someone please tell me what the bloody hell is happening?” Dr. Tomas Eli, team leader at the Large Hadron Collider, demanded. It was the assignment of a lifetime, and his team’s experiment had been going swimmingly until moments ago.
A soft-spoken Italian physicist typed some code into a black monitor not far away. “Experiment 7HC is still running, sir. The power is feeding in, but nothing is coming around the loop.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I thought so, too,” she agreed.
Dr. Eli spoke evenly into the microphone. “Anyone else? Cambridge unit? I need to know if we should stop it.”
He looked toward his fellow scientist from the Home Island. She and her team worked at a computer station across the gymnasium-sized control center. The dark-haired woman was named Claire, he thought.
The spectacled physicist looked up at him, then back to her terminal.
“Claire? I need an answer.”
“It’s Clarice, actually.”
He wanted to smack his forehead. “Just talk!”
“Sir, we’re getting the same thing on this end. Power is dumping into the loop and feeding the experiment, but nothing is coming out the other side. Take a look for yourself.”
The giant screen on the biggest wall of the room lit up. Clarice projected her monitor so the other scientists could see her data.
“Right here.” Her screen showed a perfect circle that represented the collider loop. “The beam shoots down the magnets until it reaches this point. Then the energy disappears.”
He felt a faint rumble under his loafers, much like a heavily-laden lorry driving on a street nearby. That was impossible, though, because they were far underground.
“People!” he shouted. “Energy doesn’t just disappear. The collider loop is no more complex than a sewer, for cripes’ sake. You piss in one end of the pipe and it comes out the other. If we lose connection or alignment, the power gets shut off. We have ten different safety programs with that one simple task. So. Tell me where that energy is going!” He pointed to the giant image on the wall.
The people who would most likely know were currently out.
“Where the holy hell is Dr. Johnson?” he asked the room. There was some good-natured competition among the twenty-two nations who shared research time at the collider, but he was man enough to admit the American scientist from MIT was near the top in terms of intellect.
But the shaggy-haired brainiac was gone.
The American team, including Dr. Johnson, had run out of the control room a few minutes before the power spikes and lags. The Americans left a few grad students at their desk, but he didn’t trust them to take out the trash. It wasn’t a knock on the Yanks, either. He didn’t trust any grad student with complex problems.
When one of the young men spoke up, he almost scoffed.
“Sir! I think we have the answer!”
“Just tell me,” Tomas droned.
The grad student took a deep breath before continuing. “It’s not us. It’s—"
A blue light on Dr. Eli’s computer keyboard caught his eye.
Then it filled the room.
The Large Hadron Collider finally returned all that energy.
Wollemi National Park, New South Wales, Australia
Destiny shouted into her radio, desperate to know where to go. “Base, come in. Base!”
The fire came in with cyclone-force winds and instant summertime heat. She’d seen fire move at over a hundred kilometers per hour, but only from the safety of a spotter plane. Never from the ground.
It’s not even forest fire season.
The blaze came up the valley so fast, she appreciated she might have died if someone hadn’t flashed that light in her eyes. It was a mystery how they got back to camp so fast, but she was going to kiss them once she was safe on the other side of the hill.
For the first few minutes of her escape, she dealt with Patrick and his slurred words, but finally someone else got to the radio who wasn’t sloshed.
“I’m here, Dez. I’ve got ya,” the female voice reassured her. Taiga Skyler was another animal researcher from Brisbane. She studied birds, but Destiny wasn’t going to hold it against her. At least she knew how to work a radio. “We’re still trying to figure out what that blue light was. BBC says it was a worldwide event.”
“Blue light?” she asked.
That’s what woke me up.
She didn’t have time for trivial things.
“I’m halfway up. I need to know if the fire is up top.” She thanked her luck that her big sister had taught her how to rock-climb and scramble. Those lessons were two decades old, but they’d kept her alive the last fifteen minutes as she hopped from rock to rock up the exposed hillside. Her footing felt sure, even in the shaky beam of her weak flashlight.
“The drone is already up in the air. You’re mostly clear, Dez. Go to your right one more time, then go up again. You’ll be fine. We’re chucking in the tents and already have the trucks started to get us out of here the moment you arrive.”
“K. Out.” She hung the radio off her belt and continued to hop from rock to rock. Somewhere up above, a small four-prop drone carried a video camera over the sandstone ridge. That eye-in-the-sky gave her a huge advantage over the surging fire. Several times on her climb, flare-ups began above her, and she asked Taiga where to go to avoid them.
The hillside brightened as she climbed higher than the forest in the valley. The dancing flames engulfed tree crowns like giant torches and cast plenty of light on her. She made better t
ime once she didn’t need to hold the flashlight.
But fire likes to go up too, so she couldn’t take a rest at any point on the hill.
Push it, girl!
As she neared the top of the steep climb, her radio crackled with Taiga’s excited voice.
“This thing’s a whopper! It’s spreading through the park. It’s hopping all over your valley, Dez. You have to get up to the top before you get boxed in.”
She didn’t ask any questions. She shook off her backpack and shoved it behind a rock. A tense situation had just become life or death.
“I’m going to make it,” she said into the black walkie before securing it to her belt one last time.
She looked up at the last thirty feet of the steep terrain with grim determination, but a black shape scurried by her feet and made her lose focus. For a couple of seconds, she teetered between standing there and falling back down the rocks.
“Sweet Jesus!”
She recognized the compact shape and cute waddle of a wombat. The little thing was about the size of a cattle dog with the gray fur of a roo. She’d never seen one move that fast, but it headed back down the escarpment instead of up. It wouldn’t find sanctuary down there unless it had survival skills she didn’t know about.
“Good luck, little guy,” she said sadly.
Destiny grabbed onto the rock with both hands and pulled herself up. She used her feet as supports and kicked her legs to give momentum to mount the next big ledge. Her long pants scraped the sharp edges, and her legs banged against the rocks, but she ignored the pain.
“Up, up, up!”
The heat of the fire made her sweat like mad, but she continued to climb. The inferno also roared like a freight train behind her back. There was probably some formula regarding how much smoke a person could suck in and still operate like she was, but she didn’t want to know when she’d reach the limit.
She grabbed onto another ledge and repeated the process to climb another six feet.
Her radio interrupted her climb. “Dez. You are beating the fire, but it is coming around the hill toward us, so don’t stop.”
There was no time to respond, but she did catch sight of the flashing blue and red running lights on the tiny drone’s undercarriage as she headed up the last pitch of the rockface. The whole camp was undoubtedly watching her on the data collection laptop.
Her palms puddled up from all the anxiety. She wiped them on her hips before stepping off. “Slow and steady,” she said to herself. None of her sister’s training ever covered fast evacuations from fire zones.
Destiny hopped to the next boulder, then reached for another shelf edge. It would be a simple up and over to the top. However, when she grabbed onto the rock, the soft sandstone lip broke off.
She hit the ground ten feet below before she knew she was in the air.
Southern Cross Logistics, Shipping Terminal. Modesto, CA
“We’ve got you all hooked up.” The dock hand shoved a clipboard at him, so Buck pulled a pen from his shirt to sign off. He’d already done a walkaround to confirm the service lines were solid, the fifth wheel was locked, and the tires on the trailer had some tread left.
He checked the boxes on the clipboard to affirm to king and country he had indeed looked those things over.
While he had a captive audience, he tried to strike up some small talk.
“Did you see that blue light about ten minutes ago?”
“No, but you are the third driver to ask me about it.”
“You know our type,” he said dramatically. “Get a few miles behind us and we start to see ghosts, aliens, and bears. Sometimes all at once.”
He laughed and signed his name, but when he went to hand off his masterpiece, the other guy was punching keys on his phone. The dock worker continued typing for a few seconds before taking the offered clipboard.
The man lazily ripped the top sheet off the stack of duplicates and whipped it back to Buck. He turned around without saying a word, returning his attention to the phone.
“Thanks,” Buck said to the man’s back.
“Yeah,” the man replied.
“There’s those California manners,” Buck said to himself.
Only eleven states between him and Garth, but at least he had his paperwork done.
Four
Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, Pennsylvania
Carl Junker glanced at the tired gray phone. It rang every hour, on the hour, when the safety team called him in the main control room. He was the day manager of the TMI-1 reactor, and he detested the prospect of endlessly picking up that phone for the rest of his career.
Everything at the nuclear plant ran on schedules, especially maintenance and safety. He peeked at the big analog clock hanging from the wall to confirm the hour of yet another safety check.
It’s not time!
Carl scrambled to get the phone up to his ear. He said “Hello?” before the base reached his mouth.
“Holy shit!” the tech screeched into the phone. “We just had a radiation spike that was off the charts! Fuck, we didn’t have our suits on! We have to run!”
“I don’t show any issues,” Carl replied in a businesslike voice. “Just talk to me. Stay calm.” There were lots of reasons for calls to come in at the wrong time. In one instance, a safety inspector’s watch battery died, and he was ten minutes late with check-in. That almost shut the whole plant down.
The man on the phone let out a string of cussing that was hard to decipher because of his hammering shouts. The tirade ended with “and we have to clear out, you stupid asshole!”
The crew counted on him to be the voice of calm and reason, and in this case, he had plenty of evidence on his side. Carl’s control board showed clear. No radiation. No alarms. Nothing. The designers worked in five layers of redundancy for almost every piece of equipment, and the detection sensors were linked together on the sprawling campus, so even a radiation spike as faint as a dental x-ray would engage alarms throughout the plant.
“Don’t run. We’re still good up here. I need you to stay calm.”
“No way!” the tech shouted. “Calm? I’m dead! We have to go!”
Carl shifted on his feet as if bracing himself for something unsavory. Sending men and women to die was a potential part of his job. He’d never had to do it before, but if the plant was in danger, he’d send everyone to their doom to prevent a bigger catastrophe. But his board was still green.
“I need you to stay there and tell me how I can make this right. We all have to fix this, or people outside the plant are going to die.” It was what he would say if the emergency was real.
“Lots of people are going to die,” the man blubbered.
He didn’t believe anything serious was happening, but he couldn’t ignore the call. The eggheads had told them there was a one-in-88 quadrillion chance that all of the sensors could fail at the same time, which he took to mean there was always a tiny bit of chance left in the system. To figure out if all the sensors were wrong, he needed the tech to give him actual information.
“Who’s this on the line?” he asked in an even tone. Techs moved around, and the tinny phones made every man’s voice sound the same, so it was hard to know.
The man didn’t reply right away, which led him to suspect the guy had dropped the phone and made a run for it, but he answered after ten or fifteen seconds. “Pete. Pete Boddington. I took an extra shift. I shouldn’t be here.”
Fuck. Not Pete. I didn’t even recognize his voice.
Manpower always drove him crazy. Pennsylvania Power figured anyone could be slapped into a chair to physically watch some dials and switches and walk around the cooling tower every forty-five minutes. It was easy money for college kids and recent retirees like Pete, but it was about as exciting as watching already-dried paint. Some people couldn’t handle it.
However, Pete had worked at the plant for almost four decades. He’d been in the middle of every emergency procedure they’d had during
that time, including the Big One. The man had retired and come back for more, so he couldn’t write him off as being overly dramatic.
A pang of anxiousness repeatedly kicked him in the gut.
“Hey, Pete,” he replied. This time, he fought to keep his voice steady. “I didn’t recognize you.”
Without realizing he did it, Carl’s hand touched his radiation badge. He found its silence very comforting.
“Boss,” Pete sobbed. “I need to go.”
He considered that he could have run out the door and down the long hallway and been at the containment area in the time it took him to get the other man talking.
“Listen, Pete. Just a second. We’re gonna walk through this nice and slow. Tell me what you saw.”
The veteran plant worker breathed heavily into the handset. “Blue light. Everywhere. It shot out of containment and went up into the sky.”
A mental alarm finally went off in his brain. He’d read an eyewitness account of one of the survivors of Chernobyl. In the middle of the night, he witnessed blue light bursting out of the damaged containment building. He described it as a laser-like beam shooting up into infinity. For some reason, that man’s words had always stuck with him.
Carl still didn’t think the old man could be right when all his instruments said otherwise, but he trusted him enough to hit the warning claxon.
“How about a shutdown drill?” he said to the Pennsylvania Power crew in the room.
His team snapped into action, as he expected.
It wasn’t part of the exercise, but he figured he’d go pay a visit to Mr. Boddington anyway. See what would make him say something so out of character that he threatened to break and run away.
“I’ll be right back.”
Wollemi National Park, New South Wales, Australia
Destiny woke up where she had fallen.
“That was a real dumper,” she remarked.
She tilted her head to see what was on her chest.
“What the?” Her friends had parked the little white drone smack in the middle of her body. She picked it up and looked into the black dome camera. “Did you guys lose power?”
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 3