When she sat up, her eyes became blurry and the back of her head painfully pulsed with every heartbeat. She gingerly touched a small cut under her hair and felt blood.
“Ouch.”
She set the drone aside and used the wall of the escarpment to help her stand. She looked around, trying to figure out how long she’d been out. The sky was still mostly black, save a lighter blue on the eastern horizon. The fire continued to lap at the rocks below her.
“Guys, I hope I wasn’t out long.” She felt silly talking to the futuristic device. “Take off and get out of here. I’m fine, now. Go!”
The four-prop camera platform still had its lights on, but the fans weren’t spinning. She figured her friends landed it on her chest to rouse her from her fall, but she couldn’t fathom why the operator wasn’t getting it into the air again.
“Up!” She extended her arms and held it out like it was baby Simba, expecting it to gloriously turn on and lift off, but nothing happened.
It was an expensive item, but she was more than happy to leave it behind, just like her bed, blanket, chair, and all the personal items in her backpack. Nothing was more important than escaping with her life, so she placed it on the ledge by her feet.
The smell of the fire was pungent, and it felt like breathing in air from a smokestack, but she forced herself to stand there for a few moments and regain her wits.
“I’m— I’m—”
A tongue of fire appeared on a bush a few feet away, so she hopped up to the first rock she could grab. Her brain swooned inside her head, but she held on until it cleared up.
“I’m fine,” she told nobody.
Her arms were almost spent, but the heat below gave her the motivation to pull herself back up. Then she grabbed onto the next ledge, to the left of where the rock had split off before.
With one last grunt that would have made any tennis diva proud, she pulled herself up to the very top. The flat summit of the scrub-covered ridge was ten feet ahead of her, but she also saw the open air of the next valley. Unlike the conflagration on her side, there was no smoke or sparks floating in the air over there. The base camp, and her research team, were in the clear.
She turned around for a second to look at what she’d escaped. The forest fire had reached near the top of the escarpment, but it hadn’t yet jumped to the summit. The steeper wall of rock near the top didn’t have anything to burn, which was why her friends with the drone had guided her there. Now it was calm around her, relative to the furies of Hell burning in the rest of the valley.
“Good god.” She pulled out her walkie, concerned the drone was still on the ground below. “Guys, get that thing out of there. We don’t want to lose it.”
She wiped her dry lips and laughed at what she was thinking.
I could scale back down there and rescue the stupid drone.
It was fifteen feet below, and she’d already made it once.
“Don’t be a hero after the battle is won,” she whispered. It was something her sister had taught her. “I know where it is, guys. We’ll come back after the fire if we can. Right now, I’m coming down. I’ll take a couple of long necks if you don’t mind.” She laughed with relief.
While she secured the walkie talkie to her belt, she noticed the leaves rustle in some brush about twenty feet away. An animal stepped into the unnatural light cast by the mammoth fire.
Her breath caught in her throat, but this time, it wasn’t caused by the oxygen-sucking fire or the stench of the smoke.
“Oi.”
Southern Cross Logistics, Shipping Terminal. Modesto, CA
Buck drove his tractor-trailer around the lot with the windows open while waiting for the air conditioner to spit out some relief. He waved at another driver coming into the terminal because he piloted the same model of Peterbilt sleeper as his. He was happy to indulge that bit of camaraderie, but the second he was out of the tight parking lot and on the main road, he turned on the radio to search for information.
“And the media continues to complain about fake news—”
He clicked to the next station.
“My brothers and sisters, the church is at a crossroads—”
Click.
“—like we saw with the Fukushima reactor.”
Buck listened for a moment to confirm it was actual news but soon had to concentrate on making a left turn. One of the clueless drivers waiting at the light had stopped too close to the intersection, so he had to swing wide to avoid clipping a bumper.
He wanted to glare at the driver, but the woman didn’t look up while he drove by. He was used to four-wheelers lost in their own worlds, so he decided to ignore it. However, she disappeared from his awareness entirely when he spotted the sign pointing the way to the interstate.
“Freddy? You got your ears on?” He talked to the GPS route-finder bolted to the top of his dash. It earned the nickname Freddy, after Freddy Kruger, because a previous version of the software had a knack for jolting him awake in the middle of the night to tell him where he was. It was a real nightmare on every street. “Come on, boy. Get me to Interstate 5.”
He'd programmed the route before he ate lunch, so it should have been calling out every turn. Despite giving the computer a stern look, it remained silent.
“Come on! Just freakin’ work!” He felt the temptation to bang on it to get it to talk like they did in the movies, but in his experience, that never worked with anything technological. That was why when he went home, he preferred the company of big-block carbureted engines in his hot rods, rather than the modern electrical monstrosities they put in vehicles these days.
The news caught his ear again. “And who do we believe? People around the world report seeing a blue light, but no one is able to say what it was.” The male voice handed off the question to his partner, a woman.
“So far, officials at NASA have been unwilling to commit to an answer. Privately, off the record, some insiders with the agency suggest it was a big meteor that bounced off the outer atmosphere. Another theory is that it burned up or struck the ocean somewhere. If the latter, we may expect tsunami warnings to be issued very soon.”
The man spoke as if their dialogue was well-rehearsed. “Would that cause some of the electrical disturbances we’ve seen here on the East Coast?”
“It would indeed. These EMP-like fluctuations—”
“EMP?” the man inquired with a practiced interruption.
“Electromagnetic Pulse. It means there was a disruption in the upper atmosphere that could result in the sorts of interference we are seeing here on the ground.”
“I’ve always heard that was associated with nuclear weapons.”
The woman let out a tense chuckle. “Yes, that is the most common threat in fiction. However, EMPs could be caused by benign sources, relatively speaking, like solar ejections or meteor strikes, as we’ve been discussing.”
Buck knew a little about EMPs from his books on tape. The narrated stories gave him something to do during the long hours behind the wheel, but he didn’t listen just for recreation. Each of them taught something new about prepping and survival. In his view, there was no tougher challenge than facing a world stripped of modern technology, devoid of electricity. Deep down, he always wondered if he could survive such a catastrophe.
An EMP would explain the blue light high up in the atmosphere.
He rolled up the windows as he approached the highway onramp, because the air coming out of the vents was finally cool.
“Would it knock a plane out of the air, like it did at La Guardia?” the male host asked his companion.
Buck almost pulled his truck over because they mentioned the airport where Garth was this morning.
“Possibly. Planes are hardened to the effects of electromagnetism since they spend a lot of time plying the skies through thunderstorms. If it was close enough to the source of an E-M pulse, the energy might overwhelm its defenses. The problem is that military grade EMPs are designed to explode twenty or t
hirty miles in the air. Meteor strikes against the atmosphere might cause spikes much higher than that. Say sixty miles.”
“So they weren’t close to the aircraft.”
“Not that anyone can confirm.”
The pair went back and forth with their discussion but never returned to the briefly-mentioned crash.
He’d had enough. “Tell me about effin’ La Guardia!”
“Could it have been a UFO?” the radio man asked.
Buck hammered the dial to get it to another station.
“…we’re still waiting for a statement from our European correspondent regarding the disaster at CERN.”
He hit the button again and spoke in a terse voice. “What about the plane crash?”
“…the St. Louis Rams lost this weekend.”
“Sports? Come on!”
He hit every pre-set button on his radio, but none of the stations mentioned a plane accident.
Buck reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He hit the redial button and listened to the ringing on the other end of the line as he merged into the traffic of the interstate.
“Pick up, Garth. Be okay.”
The phone went to voicemail, same as last time.
“Yo, this is Garth. Drop those digits…”
He hung up. Adding another voicemail to the one he’d left before wouldn’t get his son to call back any faster. His boy wasn’t on a plane, so there was no reason to think he’d been injured in the crash. Overreacting was something Garth’s mother was famous for. He didn’t want to follow her example.
The familiar green of the highway sign caught his eye.
“Ten miles to I-5, then seventy miles until Sacramento and I-80. From there, we turn east for the rest of the trip,” he said in an upbeat tone.
Buck glanced over his shoulder to the little dog crate sitting on his bed. Big Mac had been asleep when he’d started the truck and hadn’t stirred since. The little monster would sleep all day if Buck allowed it, but today he was tempted to find some potholes to shake him awake. He enjoyed having someone to talk to on the long trip.
Especially when he was nervous.
He wouldn’t admit it to Big Mac, but all the talk of EMPs, plane crashes, and the blue light had him thinking about how far he was from his son. All his years of planning for the end of the world as we know it would count for nothing if he was on the wrong side of the country when it all kicked off. His mind raced in that direction as if summoned by a higher power.
He didn’t know why, but too much time behind the wheel allowed for a fertile imagination.
His heavily-laden truck was already up to 75. He had no plans to slow down until he reached White Plains, New York.
“I just need everything to hold together for four days,” he joked to himself. “Just four days.”
Five
La Guardia Airport, New York City, NY
The black shape fell from the sky and revealed itself to be a tumbling, out-of-control jetliner. Garth recognized the twirling silhouette a fraction of a second before it crumpled into the runway and exploded.
“Whoa!” he mouthed.
The tendrils of the blast reached out in every direction, and bits of hot debris shot off with it. One piece of flaming metal ricocheted against the tail fin of the big Korean airliner, then tumbled through the glass of the terminal about fifty feet to his right.
“Garth! Shit! Move!” Sam ran up from behind and pulled him away from the windows. Smaller pieces of the downed plane tore through panes of glass, some close to his head.
The inside of the terminal went from zero to chaos in two seconds flat. Men and women squealed as they panicked and stampeded toward the far side of the building. Many looked back as if seeing the next deadly projectile would give them a chance to dodge it. If Garth were running with them, he knew better than to look back. His dad taught him to never be at the end of a fleeing crowd.
Why am I not running with them?
He became aware of Sam tugging at his t-shirt so he would follow.
Garth went with him because he was temporarily on autopilot. “Did you see that thing crash?”
Sam snorted. “The whole world did. I saw it the second it hit. I hope someone survived.”
Garth didn’t bother offering his opinion that no one could have walked away from such a wreck. The doomed jet hit with its nose pointed right at the pavement.
He followed his friend for several seconds as he mulled over what he’d witnessed. How many people were on that plane? How many had he watched die right in front of him? This was foremost on his mind until he stepped on broken glass.
“Hey, where are we going?” he finally thought to ask.
Sam released him, so he was free to go where he wanted, but his buddy kept walking toward the giant billboard at the end of the terminal. “We came up here to see where my parents are, and I’m going to do that. If that was their plane, I’m going to fuckin’ lose it.”
Garth looked at the wreckage. He expected to see fire rescue trucks and ambulances out there, but he realized it had only been thirty seconds since the impact. There was no way anyone could get to the crash site that fast.
“I really don’t think that was their plane,” he offered, knowing he was just making things up. However, he thought of something positive for his friend’s benefit. “They are probably already on the ground, like you said.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll know in a second.” Sam hopped over more glass and continued on his way. Garth also jumped over the shards, but he purposefully ignored a little smudge of red on the tiled floor.
“Cool.”
By the time they reached the big board, the terminal was mostly clear of personnel on the half facing the accident. Even the ticket agents and baggage handlers stood on the far side.
A police officer yelled the second he came up a nearby escalator. “Hey, you two!”
Sam ignored him and studied the billboard. There had to be five hundred cities listed in a dozen columns. Some names blinked. Some changed colors. Fortunately, they were in alphabetical order, so they weren’t hopelessly lost.
“Chicago. Chicago. There are ten flights from Chicago today. Which one were they on?” Sam stuck his hand in his pants pocket and began to dig for something.
“Get the hell out of here, you two.” The officer strode right over to them. Another cop ran up the escalator, looked at the boys and the attending policeman, then took off in another direction.
“Just a damned second,” Garth snapped.
“You aren’t safe, kid. Get moving before I drag you out of here.” The bearded officer reminded him of a Marine drill instructor. His dad taught him to always respect officers of the law because of the uniform, but this guy demanded respect because he already was a badass.
“We’re going,” Garth responded with trepidation.
He turned to Sam. “Come on. He says we have to leave.”
“Not yet,” Sam deadpanned.
The policeman pressed the button on his shoulder radio. “I’m up on two. Minor damage. We’ve got the north side of ticketing. It’s pretty clear already, except for a couple of kids at the kino board.”
That struck a nerve, because Garth didn’t see himself as a kid.
“We’re moving,” Garth assured the guy. He took several steps away from the board and hoped Sam got the message.
“Almost have it!” Sam shouted.
Instead of walking away, his buddy got closer to the column containing the ten Chicagos. He’d pulled out the flight information from his pocket and compared it to the names on the board. He read them aloud until he found the one he wanted.
“5-8-6. On time. That’s it!” Sam looked at the officer and acted surprised to see him. Garth knew that was part of his act with authority figures. He wasn’t exactly lying, but he did know how to play dumb like nobody’s business. “Sorry, Officer. We didn’t know this was going to be evacuated.”
“You didn’t see that plane come down and break th
ese windows?” The officer’s sarcasm was highly refined, like he used it all the time. “It’s your lucky day I was here to warn you about it then. Go on!”
Sam bowed and held out his hands as if begging for forgiveness. “Sorry. We’re going.”
Garth also bent his head out of respect for the officer.
They both took a few steps, but the big flight board started beeping. When he glanced back at it, each line in the columns changed to show the flight was delayed. Hundreds of cities flipped as he watched.
“586?” Garth inquired.
Sam looked at the board. Every flight was affected, including the one he’d just confirmed. He shook his head before storming off.
“Scram!” the uniformed man insisted.
Garth had been playing it cool for Sam’s sake. He really wanted him to check on his parents’ flight, but it felt unnatural to not run away with all the others. He wondered if Sam was in shock. Is that how he fought that initial urge to run?
Could I be in shock, too?
Seeing that plane crash and explode was a lot to process. Once he and Sam began to trot toward all the other frightened passengers in the terminal, their mood infected him like a deadly virus.
I could have been killed back there.
Wollemi National Park, New South Wales, Australia
Destiny’s head was already scrambled from her fall and inhaling too much smoke, so she didn’t react as fast as she might any other day. When the sleek predator came out of the bushes, she didn’t even think to run. Instead, she tried talking to it.
“Hey, girl, what’s up?”
At first, she thought it was a dingo, because a few had recently been spotted in the park. It was about the size of a large dog with orange-colored fur and a long tail, but there was something wrong with the head. If it was a dog or even a dingo, it was a breed she’d never seen in the wild.
“And what are you, cutie?” she added with a clumsy snap of her fingers.
The animal answered with a snarl, and all thought of taxonomic assignments took a back seat. She was frightened, but still laboring under the effects of oxygen deprivation. She giggled, and it surprised her.
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 4