EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 22 | The Coldest Night
Page 1
The Coldest Night
Robert J. Walker
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
About the Author
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1
“Hey, Jack, did you hear the news?” Bill asked, leaning his torso through the office door.
“Uh, about the president? I think I read the article yesterday, yeah,” Jack murmured disinterestedly, barely paying attention to his boss. His eyes were locked on his computer screen as he rotated the complex, three-dimensional mechanical object in his design program.
“No, no, it’s not about politics,” Bill said, squeezing himself through the half-closed door.
Jack sighed and only barely managed to restrain himself from rolling his eyes. He hated being disturbed while he was in the middle of a project, especially one that required as much concentration as the present one. He enjoyed his job immensely; it was suitably challenging and rewarding. Ironically enough, the biggest obstacle to productivity he faced was his boss’s frequent visits to his office, most of which consisted of idle chatter and office gossip. Still, as much as Bill’s interruptions bothered him, he never said anything. He knew Bill was in a bad place after going through a difficult divorce, so he always tried to be compassionate and understanding when Bill came wandering in. Jack minimized the design program, smiled as his gaze fell upon his desktop background—a photograph of his beautiful wife and teenage daughter taken on a Hawaiian beach on their yearly family vacation—and then looked up at Bill.
“So, what’s the big news, Bill?” he asked.
“There’s a superstorm rolling in,” Bill answered excitedly. Although the body around them was unmistakably that of a heavyset middle-aged man, the eyes in his chubby face sparkled with boyish anticipation.
“A superstorm?” Jack’s reaction to the news was markedly different than Bill’s. The smile faded from his craggy face, replaced by a look of consternation. “How bad are we talking?”
“They’re calling it ‘The Valentine’s Day Blizzard’ because it’s supposed to hit sometime tomorrow, the 14th, but that name doesn’t do it any justice, not from what I’ve heard.” Bill had a strangely maniacal glint in his eyes, almost as if he were ready to welcome whatever chaos the superstorm would bring. “I’ve just been reading up on it now. One website says it’s gonna be the biggest storm in a generation. I’m talking entire buildings buried under snow, the city totally cut off and isolated. It’s supposed to hit us harder than anywhere else—well, here and the mountains. Hey, don’t you have that brother who lives way up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere? You think he’ll be okay?”
“Arthur will be just fine,” Jack said. “He’s lived up there on his own the better part of thirty years now. He’s survived many blizzards in his cabin.”
“Not like this one,” Bill said.
“I knew a blizzard was coming in, but this is the first I’ve heard of it being a superstorm. Are you sure that isn’t, well, fake news or sensationalism or something?” Jack asked.
“I’m sure,” Bill said. “They upgraded it to superstorm category just about an hour ago. It’s on multiple websites and news stations if you don’t believe me. Apparently, it’s picking up strength at an unprecedented speed, behaving unlike any storm they’ve seen for twenty or thirty years.”
“That’s not good,” Jack murmured, half to himself, lost in a sudden tempest of worrying thoughts in his mind. “That’s not good at all…”
“Yeah, looks like it’s gonna be a real doozy,” Bill said, still oddly excited about the prospect of a massive blizzard hitting them. “I’m letting everyone go home early this afternoon, you know, to get ready for the storm and all that. So if you want to head out now, Jack, I—”
The office was suddenly plunged into darkness, causing Bill to pause, and an eerie silence filled the gloomy space. The constant hum and low whirr of printers and other office machines were gone.
“Ooh, power outage,” Bill said. “Let me check and see if it’s got something to do with the storm.”
Jack already had out his phone, though, and had noted, with no small measure of trepidation, that the device was dead.
“That’s weird,” Bill said slowly. “My phone’s—”
“Dead, I know,” Jack said warily. He suspected that this was something far worse than a mere power outage. It likely had nothing to do with the incoming blizzard, which would be the cherry on top of a terrible situation if his suspicions about the apparent power outage were correct.
“What are the odds of that?” Bill said. “Both our phones dying at the exact same time. We should buy some lottery tickets, huh?”
“It’s nobody’s lucky day today, Bill, trust me on this,” Jack said, getting up from his desk. His actions were slow and deliberate, but his mind was racing, and a million anxious thoughts were bouncing around in his head. First and foremost among his concerns, though, were his wife and daughter.
“I don’t see why the storm would have affected the power if it’s still way out at sea now, though,” Bill mused, oblivious to the reality of what was actually going on.
“The storm has nothing to do with this,” Jack said, “and it’s no power outage, not if my theory is correct.”
“Your theory? What else could this be?” Bill asked, sounding worried for the first time rather than excited.
Jack walked over to his office window, which looked out over the whole city from the twentieth floor of this building and opened the blinds. Sunlight streamed in from the clear afternoon, and the blue skies carried no hint of the coming weather. Bill walked over to the window and followed Jack’s gaze fixed on the nearest intersection below them, one of the biggest in the city and one of the city’s main traffic arteries.
When Bill saw what Jack was staring at, he let out a low whistle. “That’s one hell of a pileup,” he murmured. “Worst I’ve ever seen! There must be over twenty cars all smashed together in there! All the traffic lights must have gone out. But you know people in this city, worst drivers in America, absolute maniacs, the lot of ‘em, and—”
“It’s not just at the intersection, Bill,” Jack said. His voice was calm, but inside his chest, his heart was hammering. Everything felt surreal and dreamlike … or, rather, nightmarish.
Bill looked more closely and saw traffic a
ccidents everywhere; on every street they could see from up here, there were pileups and collisions, and not a single vehicle was moving. Every one of them was either completely stationary or had collided with another car or a lamppost.
“Listen,” Jack said, opening the window.
“I don’t hear anything,” Bill said.
“Exactly,” Jack said as he walked away from the window and went back to his desk. There was an item in it that he had been keeping there for a while, that he now knew he would need.
While Jack was doing this, it hit Bill; with all these car accidents, the air should have been thick with the sound of wailing sirens … yet there was nothing. The usual city hubbub, with its constant drone of traffic, interspersed with the pulsing of deep bass from loud music, and the hum and whirr of countless machines, was gone. In its place was a surreal silence, broken only by human voices.
“My God,” Bill whispered, struck by the terrible revelation of what Jack was pointing out. “What’s … what’s really going on, Jack? What is this?” He was scarcely able to comprehend or process what he saw, but he understood on a deep, instinctual level, that this was some sort of cataclysmic disaster, one that he couldn’t begin to wrap his head around.
“I think that what’s happened,” Jack said slowly, feeling strangely calm despite understanding the immense severity of this situation, “is that we’ve been hit with an EMP.”
“EMP? What on earth is that?” Bill asked.
Jack was about to explain when a blinding flash blazed a shear of light across the horizon. Something dazzlingly bright, like a horizonal meteor, streaked through the air, and a few seconds later, a deep, ominous boom resounded across the city.
“What on earth was that?” Bill murmured, his jaw hanging open and his eyes wide with shock.
Before Jack could voice any theories about what they’d seen, more streaks blazed through the air, and a series of deep, concussive booms echoed across the city. They were missiles or rockets of some sort; Jack was sure of it. He knew now, without a doubt, that the city, perhaps the entire nation, was under attack … and his wife and child were out there in the midst of the madness. The eerie silence changed abruptly in tone; even from here, twenty floors up, Jack and Bill could hear the screams of terror and panic from below.
“I have to go,” Jack muttered. “Get everyone out of here, Bill—now. Make sure you tell them all to go straight home and stay there. You do the same.”
“B–but, where are you going?” Bill stammered.
“To save my wife and child,” Jack said calmly.
“But, uh, oh God, oh my God!” Bill suddenly yelled, his voice shrill with abrupt terror.
Jack barely had time to turn around before he was blinded by a brilliant flash, accompanied by a deafening blast that hurled him across the office with brutal force. He was unconscious before his body even hit the floor, and a thick darkness swallowed him up as if he were wrapped up tight in a wet, suffocating blanket.
2
Kate hummed along to the bouncy, upbeat pop song as she drove, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel in time to the infectious beat. She was a child of the 80s and 90s, and most of her favorite music was from those decades. However, she enjoyed a lot of current pop music—much to the embarrassment of her teenage daughter, who swung between being bemused and mortified that her mother shared some of her musical tastes.
This song—one of Taylor Swift’s big hits—immediately brought thoughts of her daughter, Susan, to mind. She was on her way to pick her up from ballet practice at a dance school downtown. Kate wasn’t much of a fan of that part of town and would have preferred to have sent Susan to a school in a better area. But she’d been attending this dance studio since Kate and Jack had moved into the city twelve years ago, having left their small town in the mountains to pursue better work opportunities and a better education for their daughter.
Like her daughter, Kate was a city girl and loved the buzz and busyness of urban life, but she knew that Jack missed their quiet life in the mountains. He wasn’t quite as obsessively in love with the wilderness as his older brother, Arthur, who for decades had essentially shunned civilization in favor of a hermit-like existence, living off the land, totally off-grid, deep in the mountains. Nevertheless, Jack drove five hours out to the mountains every other weekend to visit his parents and spend time hunting, hiking, fishing, and camping. He occasionally took a few extra days to trek deep into the mountains to see Arthur, too.
Despite his love for mountains and wild places, it had been Jack’s idea to move to the city. He’d snagged a high-paying job for computer hardware design and electronic engineering, something he was passionate about, and Kate had happily gone along with the idea. They planned to retire back in the mountains, eventually.
As she drove, Kate wondered what their life might have been like had they stayed in the small mountain town. She probably would have ended up a housewife, instead of getting a degree and working part-time as a university lecturer. Susan would never have been able to get into dance classes and become one of the top ballerinas in her age group. Kate also missed the mountains—perhaps not as much as Jack did—but she couldn’t deny that she preferred city life.
The city was attractive in its own way, she thought as she drove over the broad river that divided the city in half. It wasn’t anything like the mountains' rugged, breathtaking beauty, but it had a unique charm.
The song faded out, and the DJ started to speak. “Hope you enjoyed that track, ladies and gents. Before I drop the next one, though, I have an urgent message. The storm that we’ve been calling the Valentine’s Day Blizzard has been upgraded to a superstorm. That’s right, everyone, the meteorologists are saying that it’s growing more severe and at an unprecedented rate, and disruptions are going to be likely across—” The DJ’s voice abruptly cut off.
But before Kate could even reach for the radio dial, she noticed something far more alarming: her car had shut down. The entire dash was blank, every light was dead, and her power steering was gone, as was any semblance of control. Terror gushed through her in an icy flush as she hurtled quietly toward a curve in the bridge … and found herself utterly unable to navigate the bend. Nothing she did could get the car to respond. The steering of the big SUV, usually so light and fluid, had become impossibly ponderous. Electronics controlled everything in the virtually brand-new vehicle, and all of them had, somehow, failed at once.
Kate had been traveling at fifty miles an hour, and while the vehicle had completely shut down, momentum carried it relentlessly forward. Kate screamed as she hurtled toward the bend, heading straight for the concrete barrier. She yanked on the steering wheel with all her might and jammed her foot so hard on the brakes it felt like she was about to dislocate her ankle, but nothing worked.
A smaller car likely would have crunched into the curved concrete and been forced to skid along the barrier until it flipped onto its roof or eventually came to a grinding stop. However, the big SUV's momentum, weight, and speed caused it to plow straight through the barrier in an explosion of gray dust and flying concrete chunks. Then it plunged in a terrifying downward arc toward the river.
For three brief, utterly horrifying seconds, Kate watched the river rushing toward her as gravity sucked her and the SUV inexorably downward. She hit the water in a tremendous splash. The impact flung her body forward, and while the seatbelt—one of the few purely mechanical objects in the vehicle, and thus one of the few things that still functioned as it should—slammed its tight grip on her torso and prevented her from being smashed with deadly force into the windshield, it didn’t stop her from hitting her head hard on the glass.
Icy water surged through the open passenger’s side window as the vehicle bobbed on the surface of the river, and it didn’t take long for the interior to fill up. And as it did, the car started to sink. Kate was dazed half-senseless from the blow against the windshield, and she was only dimly aware of the water surging in. The icy temperature of
it quickly jolted her from her groggy state. She desperately reached for her seatbelt, knowing that she had mere seconds to climb out of the passenger side and swim before the vehicle was engulfed in water. But no matter how many times Kate pressed the seatbelt button and tugged at the harness, it wouldn’t budge. She was sinking rapidly, and she was trapped.
3
“Are you going to be okay out here on your own, Susan?” Ellie, the head instructor at the dance studio, asked. “I’m really sorry. You know I’d wait out with you, but I have to lock the place up and get to my appointment, which I’m already late for.”
“I’ll be okay,” Susan said, smiling. “My mom will be here in a couple of minutes. She messaged me on WhatsApp two minutes ago, saying she was about to cross the bridge.”
“All right, then she’s only five or six minutes away,” Ellie said. “I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon. You did great today, by the way. Outstanding form, as usual. You’ll blow them away at the recital next weekend, I guarantee it!”
Susan blushed and smiled shyly. Like her mother, she was tall, long-limbed and lithe, and had her mother’s long, flowing, blond locks and sparkling blue eyes. However, she also had a good dose of her father’s natural athleticism and speed—a perfect combination for an aspiring dancer. Despite her talent and achievements, she was modest to a fault and never boastful, prideful, or arrogant. Ellie, who had been one of America’s finest ballerinas in her youth, had been instructing Susan since the tender age of four. The two of them shared a quick hug, then Ellie locked the dance school door and headed off to her car, leaving the teenage girl alone on the sidewalk.