by Thunboe, Bo
“Okay.” She rubbed her face and wished Dan were home. “What is it, honey?”
Sean’s mouth twisted in the little snarl he made when she called him anything ‘cutesy’ but he let it go.
“I think something really bad happened.” He went to the window that looked over the front yard. He felt along the edge of it and yanked the cord and the drapes rushed apart.
Mary lifted a hand to block the glare from the street light at the end of the driveway but apparently it wasn’t on. “The electricity must be out.” That explained the flashlight and his distress. Weston’s electric utility was so reliable he might not even remember the last time it went out. “Don’t worry, it’ll come back on.” She was pleased to be able to calm him like any mother would.
“It won’t, Mom.” His gaze met hers, then shot away. “I tested it.”
His voice quaked with an emotion she hadn’t heard from him since he was a little boy and a pair of coyotes surprised him in the backyard. She’d taught him to throw rocks and he’d spent at least a year walking around with the pockets of his jeans stuffed with good throwers. The coyotes had never come back but being ready had helped him conquer that emotion.
Fear.
5
Dan grabbed the steering wheel and braced himself as the car coming at him dropped off the road. Its bumper plowed into the ground and sprayed dirt and gravel into the air which rattled down on Dan’s windshield. He reflexively hit the brakes and pressed himself back against the seat. This was going to hurt!
The car slammed into him with the force and sound of an explosion.
His head snapped forward, then rebounded against the headrest, breath bursting from him.
Then, silence.
Beyond the buckled hood of his Lincoln and through a wispy haze backlit by a wonky headlight, two figures moved in the other car. The driver—whose head barely cleared the dashboard—waved. Dan waved back to let them know he was okay. He flexed his hands and moved his legs and rolled his shoulders to make sure he was. Nothing seemed broken, though his neck hurt. He rubbed it, then reached for his briefcase on the passenger seat; it wasn’t there. He leaned to feel for it on the floor but the seatbelt was locked in place and the shoulder strap held him like he was on a leash. He took off the seatbelt, scooted over, and rooted around until he found the briefcase. He pulled out his phone. The screen was dark. He raised it into the headlight glare and turned it back and forth and it looked undamaged. He knew he’d left it on, because he never turned it off. He pushed the button but nothing happened.
“Hey!” The voice—a woman’s voice—sounded like it came from the far end of a long tunnel. “... help?”
Dan flexed his jaw a few times and rubbed under his ears.
“Can you help us?”
Dan heard the woman more clearly now and realized his hearing must have been temporarily dulled by the crash.
“I’ll be right there.” He shouted the promise against his windshield. The haze between the cars suddenly billowed thicker, obscuring the other car.
Smoke!
6
Mary’s hands trembled in response to the warble of fear in her son’s voice. Ever since her children had moved in after their dad died, she’d echoed their emotions like this. But it was her job to calm Sean’s fears, not amplify them. She pressed her hands to her thighs to quiet them. “What test? Why won’t the electricity come back on?”
“The entire power grid has been burned out by an electromagnetic pulse. An EMP.” His voice was beginning to even out. Explaining something always calmed him. She kept telling him he would make a great teacher.
“How would that happen? Don’t tell me it was aliens.” He watched way too much of that ancient alien nonsense on TV.
“Not aliens, Mom.” His voice was steady now. “I’ve read a bunch about this and even my technology elective at school covered it. Only someone—a country—with nuclear capability could do it.”
A familiar tingling pain raced up her arms and into her neck and shot her brain with a buzzing static that exploded into a vision more clear and sharp than any reality.
A distant detonation shakes the air, birds drop from the sky. The whole family—Mary and Dan and Sean and Erin—stops doing yardwork and watches a mushroom cloud rise billowing up, then push outward. A shock wave roars toward them, pulverizing the forest and vaporizing the river and blasting apart their house and—
“Mom!”
Mary blinked and took a deep breath. She could taste the muddy river and smell the wood dust. She hadn’t had a delusion in so long she wasn’t prepared when the funny-bone tingle started. Of course, not all of them started that way. Some just sprang on her without warning.
“You okay, Mom?”
“If it was a nuclear bomb why... I’ve seen... shouldn’t we be gone?”
“They can make them just to put out a giant wave of electromagnetic energy that fries electronics.” Sean’s face was pale in the weak light and his mouth hung open, his breathing fast and shallow. His certainty made her believe him. She clenched herself against the fear—his fear—rising through her.
She swung her legs off the side of the bed and patted the mattress next to her. “Sit here.” When he sat, she put her arm around him and squeezed until his shoulders stopped trembling.
“Why would someone do this, Sean?”
“An EMP destroys electronics but nothing else. Our buildings, our land and resources, are fine. But all weapons bigger than a rifle are stuffed with electronics: jets, tanks, battleships, cruise missiles—even Humvees. All of them are now useless. Whoever did this, the Russians or Chinese or whatever, can come in and we can’t stop them.”
An invasion. Anxiety rose up in a howling swirl but Sean’s warm mass pressing against her helped Mary fight it off. She breathed deeply and when she was sure her voice wouldn’t shake, asked: “How do you know that’s what happened? Did you see the mushroom cloud or whatever the electro pulse does?”
“You can’t see the pulse, Mom. It’s invisible.”
This was sounding more and more like one of those thick science fiction books he read with the wild covers. “But you said you tested it?”
He pointed at the dresser. “Simple electronics like the flashlight—a battery and a bulb with just an inch or two of wire in between—are fine. And the snow blower works—it doesn’t have much wire and creates its own spark when you pull the chord.”
Mary reached for her cell phone on the nightstand. “I need to call Dan.”
Sean intercepted her hand. “You can’t call him.” He picked up her phone and showed her the screen. It was a mirror, displaying only a reflection of the room as he turned it back and forth. “Cell phones, and computers and televisions and stereos, are all gone.”
Mary’s stomach churned and her legs quivered. “Erin’s in Elgin! I let her stay up there by herself tonight. The Fran’s came home already.” She popped up from the bed and darted across the room to where the clothes she’d worn the day before lay draped over a chair. She stepped into her jeans. “I need to go get her.” Her baby was all alone. She—
“Mom!” Sean’s voice was sharp, now. “Mom!”
“What, Sean? What?” She yanked her pants up, bunching her nightgown as it went.
“I tried your van—it’s fried too.”
Mary fumbled her zipper. Stress always brought on her symptoms. She took a deep breath, then another. She finished with her pants.
“What about your dad—Dan’s—car?”
“If he comes home, it won’t be by car.”
7
As the smoke billowed higher Dan tried to open his door, but it was wedged shut. I’m going to burn to death! Smoke snaked out the heater vents and started to fill the car. He threw himself against the door, over and over, his shoulder bruising, but the door, finally, budged open. A hidden crack flooded the car with frigid air, swirling the smoke around him. He held his breath and heaved himself against the door again. Metal grated and the door f
lexed slightly and a wisp of the smoke slipped out. He kept at it and his face got hot and his vision started to blur and he was afraid he would pass out and burn to death. He covered his face with the sleeve of his suit jacket and sucked in a giant lungful of air. Then another. Wait… the air didn’t taste smoky and didn’t make him cough. He uncovered his face and the syrupy-sweet smell of antifreeze filled his nose. It wasn’t smoke—it was steam from punctured radiators. Relief poured through him.
“Are you okay over there?” Both people in the other car were waving now. “Hang on!” He gave up on his door and crawled across the car. The passenger door opened without trouble and he crawled out into gusting wind that drove the cold through his clothes and chilled him like he was naked. He reached back inside and snagged his overcoat off the back seat, shrugged into it, and buttoned it up. He pulled the knit hat out of the pocket and over his head. Much better.
He stepped toward the other car.
And went down hard, hands breaking his fall just enough to avoid smashing his face.
He got up to his hands and knees, the ground cold and hard under his bare hands, and slowly rose to his feet. He brushed the snow off his pants and hands, then walked carefully to the other car, keeping his weight over each firmly-planted foot. The ground was slick and his dress shoes weren’t cut out for anything but clear sidewalks. The car was a long sedan from the eighties with a hard, square design and lots of chrome trim. A pale gray-haired woman sat in the driver’s seat, her hands still on the wheel.
“I’m sorry about hitting you. I don’t know what happened,” she said through the glass. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Dan said.
Another gray-haired head leaned into his field of view from the passenger side. A man. “I tried to call nine-one-one but my phone must have broken in the crash. Can you call?”
“My phone was damaged, too.” Dan said. “Are you hurt?”
“My husband’s chest hurts.”
Dan bent down and peered across the car. The man looked back, a hand running up and down the chest strap of his seatbelt.
“I think it’s from the this.” He unclicked the belt and moved his shoulders in small circles. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m worried about Elsa.”
“I’m fine, Henry.” Elsa’s sharp tone brought a smile to her husband’s face.
“Why don’t you come in and we can wait for rescue together?” Henry threw a thumb over his shoulder at the wide back seat.
“Hang on,” Dan said. He walked carefully around Elsa’s car and climbed the small slope up onto the eastbound lanes of the highway. The wind whipped his pant legs, the fabric flapping loudly. The road ran straight west—back toward Des Moines—a long strip of empty black road dusted in swirling white. To the east, the road ran for a half-mile then curved south.
He gazed back up the on-ramp Elsa’s car had taken and saw a low skyline in the cloud-filtered moonlight: a couple of three-story buildings, a water tower, and a grain elevator.
He walked carefully back down the slope to the big car and tapped on the window to get Henry’s attention. “Are you folks from that town over there?”
“Yes. But our daughter just went into labor so we were heading to Moline for the birth of our first grandchild.”
"I think there’s too little traffic to wait in this cold for help,” Dan said. “Let’s walk you back home.”
8
Sean paced, thinking through what he remembered about EMPs. He shot a glance at his mom sitting on the edge of her bed. He’d only been home for a couple of days but so far she’d been steady. Steady meant she was taking her pills, sleeping enough, eating right—or at least it had in the past. But things changed with her. It was about the only thing he could count on.
He stopped in front of her. “Mom?”
“Yes, honey?”
Her voice was so soft and wounded he almost dropped it, but he needed to know. “I’m sorry for asking this but are you keeping up with your meds?”
“I’m not the one talking about nuclear war and the automobile being a thing of the past.”
She was a master at deflection. “I need a real answer.”
Her chin dropped and she looked away, but when her eyes came back to his, they narrowed. “I’m current, Sean.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.” He started pacing again to avoid meeting her gaze. “I need to tell you how bad this could be.” He laid it all out. The worst-case scenario was documented in a government report he’d read for his technology elective. The EMP would have destroyed every electronic component in its line of sight. Every system they relied on for day-to-day living was gone. Electricity and all the computing and communications systems built with them were gone. But even less technical systems—like natural gas and water—were all controlled and delivered by electronic systems. These systems could be “hardened” to mitigate the damage an EMP could do, but the probability of it happening were low and the changes were expensive so hardening had not been done.
“And everything delivered by car, truck, train, or plane is now too far away.” His mom had gone silent as he laid it out. He knelt in front of her and held her hands and tried to meet her eyes. They were wide and wouldn’t settle and her facial expression kept changing.
“Mom!”
She startled and blinked and her eyes met his and the fog drifted away. She pulled her hands away from his and put them on his shoulders. “So,” she said, her voice calm and even. “What can we do to prepare ourselves for the madness to come.”
Her words made him flinch, but then he realized she wasn’t talking about her own madness. She was talking about everyone else. She had absorbed what he said and had seen where it would lead.
Dan always said she was the smartest person in the room.
9
Mary searched through Dan’s sock drawer. Her heart thundered against her chest and her mind whirled. Calm down, Mary. Maybe Sean was just imagining this whole thing. She froze—what if he was having a delusion? Was it beginning for him? Please, Lord. Please spare him this sickness, my sickness. She took a long slow breath, held it, then released it. Sean was not having a delusion. The power was out. Her phone was dead. Something had happened.
“Found it!” She held the bank envelope in the shine of Sean’s flashlight. It was thick with Dan’s stash. She pulled out the wad of bills and spread them under the light.
“Our professor said an EMP would push us back to a barter economy, Mom. That stuff’s worthless.”
She looked at the bills. He was right, or would be. “We can use it now—right now—before anyone else figures that out.”
“The stores will be closed because the power’s out.”
“But at the twenty-four-hour places—like the gas station and Walgreens—the employees are probably still there waiting for the power to come back on.” She waved the bills. “Cash talks.”
Sean’s eyes lit up. “I’ll take this over to the gas station.”
“I’ll go,” Mary said. “While I’m gone you—”
“I know the guy who works the night shift there. He was at Northern with me for a semester and lived on my floor. He’ll open the door for me even though the power’s out.”
Mary squeezed the bills tight in her hand. “I’m the parent, Sean. If I say—”
“I’m not a kid anymore, Mom. I can do this. Plus, I can carry more.”
She knew he was right. He could do it, or anything else he put his mind to. She believed that even when he didn’t. “You need to stay focused on what you’re doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your goal is to make this money count before anyone else figures out it doesn’t and to stock up for our family before everyone else starts stocking up for theirs.” With distribution knocked out, there would be a food shortage almost immediately. “If you tell other people what you’re doing and—”
“I got this, Mom!”
“Keep quiet, get what you can, and get back home.”
&nb
sp; “Mom!”
“And don’t overpay. If you offer twenty dollars for a candy bar, your friend will think the money’s fake.”
“Okay.” He took the money and handed her the flashlight. “Hold the light and I’ll break it down.”
Mary held the light while Sean counted the money out onto the dresser. Twenty-two hundred dollars. He divided it into separate stacks and stuffed five hundred in each cargo pocket and three hundred into each of the other four pockets. When he was done his pockets bulged but nothing about the lumps gave away what made them.
Mary bit her lip. Would a good mother send her firstborn out into this night to haggle for their survival? “I should go.”
“Mom!”
“Okay. I’m sorry.” But she needed to do something while he was gone or she’d be a wreck he got back. “I’ll make an inventory of what food we have and start thinking about how to stretch it.”
“I’ll take my big backpack from Boy Scouts. It holds a lot.”
“You be careful.”
Sean ran for the stairs, feet pounding down them.
“Wait!” Mary ran to the top of the stairs. Sean stood at the bottom.
“Dan left Des Moines at midnight. What time did this thing happen?”
“About quarter after one,” Sean said.
“Then he was still in Iowa, approaching the river.” Two hundred miles away. “You said cars don’t work anymore. But what about when he was driving? What happened?”
“The engine would probably just quit and his car would glide to a stop.”
“That sounds... gentle.”
Sean looked away. Something had occurred to him, but he didn’t voice it. She didn’t press him. Dan would be all right and would get home and figure out how to get Erin and they’d be fine. Meanwhile, she and Sean would do what they could to get ready.
Mary turned off the flashlight and stood at the front window to watch Sean leave. She hugged herself against the cold radiating off the glass. A few minutes later the front door squelched open against its weather stripping and then Sean was crossing the yard, his big green backpack bouncing on his shoulders. He looked up at her window and they exchanged waves.