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.
It was true that this area of the city had seen better days. Many of the buildings were rundown, there was litter all around, and more homeless people and beggars than there ever used to be. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the worst sections of the city, though, where drug addicts got their fixes in alleys, hookers sold themselves on street corners, and gangsters shot each other—and the occasional cop—in broad daylight. Even so, Susan felt on edge here, and she carried strong pepper spray in her bag whenever she came to the studio. She’d never run into trouble, but it was wise to come prepared in this area. Ellie had been promising to move the school to a cleaner and safer part of the city for years but hadn’t managed to raise the requisite funds to do that just yet.
Susan watched as Ellie drove away, leaned against the studio's door, took out her phone, and started to browse idly through her Instagram feed as she waited for her mother to arrive.
After a few seconds, though, her phone suddenly died. “Aw come on,” Susan muttered, “the battery was at eighty percent!” She pressed and held the power button, but the device remained dark. Grumbling to herself, she shoved the useless item back into her bag and twirled one of her blond locks around her finger as she waited for her mother.
Just as she looked up at the street, though, she saw a horrifying sight: two cars collided head-on mere yards from her. Eerily enoug
h, though, there was no screeching of tires, no revving of engines. Instead, there was simply the sharp, deep crunch of metal on metal and the bang of the two heavy objects colliding.
“Oh my God!” she gasped, reaching instinctively for her phone to call 9-1-1, before remembering that it was dead.
She was about to run out to check on the occupants of the vehicles when another car came speeding by mere inches from her, also completely silently aside from the droning hum of its tires on the street. A few seconds later, that car slammed into a traffic light at the nearby intersection, hitting the steel pole with a sickening crunch.
Susan stared around her in mute horror and utter confusion as the chaos unfolded, scarcely able to process what she was seeing and what was happening. Why were these cars hurtling around in directionless silence like rudderless ghost ships at sea? Why had the entire city fallen eerily silent? That fact, she only noticed now, a few seconds after the accidents.
People were running over to the wrecked cars from the sidewalks, and when Susan looked up and down the length of the street, she saw that the crashes that had happened in front of her were far from the only ones. There were, to her complete astonishment, dozens of incidents along the entire length of the street.
If every car was crashing, and they all seemed to be dead. Suddenly she wondered, then what had happened to her mother’s car? She was on the road right now with all this madness, and something terrible might have happened to her.
As a debilitating flood of panic and anxiety tore through Susan’s core, however, she happened to notice something else—all the lights in the stores across the street were out, and the big LED screen near the intersection, which beamed out advertising videos 24/7 was black. And as she noticed this, something her father had told her about a while back popped into her mind, and suddenly, everything clicked.
“An EMP,” she murmured, scarcely able to believe what she was saying and what was happening. “It’s gotta be an EMP.”
She was reeling from both the realization of what this was and from the thought that her mother, inadvertently caught up in the chaos, might have been involved in a serious accident. Susan felt paralyzed, rooted to the spot with panic and terror and indecision. A million thoughts were crashing through her head, bouncing around like out-of-control pinballs in her skull, and she couldn’t even manage to take a single step forward, back, or to the side. She was able to perform feats of incredible acrobatics and athleticism on the dancefloor of a studio or a stage in front of hundreds of people, yet now she felt as if she couldn’t even lift her feet from the ground.
Something else happened, though, something that jolted her from the “freeze” phase of the deeply instinctual “fight, flight, or freeze” response that seemed to have completely taken over her nervous system. A brilliant flare of light lit up the sky above her, and something big streaked over her a few hundred feet above the ground. Seconds later, a tremendous boom, the sound of a mighty explosion followed. It rocketed through the streets, loud and deep, and Susan realized that it had to have been a missile of some sort. It had struck a building nearby, and after a few seconds, some of the smaller pieces of debris from the explosion began dropping onto the street right in front of her.
That was enough to galvanize her into action, and she was able to banish the incapacitating fear and indecision from her system. She knew now, without any shadow of a doubt, that the city was under attack. Her father had told her that something like this might happen one day, and although her mother had always brushed off such things, she had taken it semi-seriously and had listened to her father’s advice on what to do in such a situation. He had prepared bugout bags for all three of them and told them to head straight home in the event of any sort of a disaster. From there, they would make their way to the mountain town where Grandpa and Grandma lived, and after that, they might even make their way to Uncle Arthur’s cabin, depending on how serious things were.
“First things first, though,” Susan said to herself, as a sudden and unexpected wave of resolute determination took hold of her. “I have to get to Mom.”
She knew the exact route her mother would be coming along; she never deviated from this path. She crossed the bridge over the river, came down onto the main street, and then took the second left. From there, she went all the way down that street before making a right turn onto this one. Right now, she could be at any point along this route, Susan thought, but she would more than likely be closer to the bridge than the studio.
More missiles streaked through the sky overhead, and this spurred a spirit of urgency into Susan. Quietly sliding her trusty pepper spray out of her bag and into her hand, she took off at a fast jog, running in the general direction of the bridge, taking the same route her mother had.
And behind her, from behind a dumpster on a slimy side street, two drug pushers watched her go with menace and lust in their eyes and slipped out of the alley to follow her.
4
Jack awoke to a shrill, constant whine that was so loud and intense that it seemed to be drilling through both ears and into the core of his brain. He was in complete darkness and feeling as if there were a tremendous weight pressing down on him from all sides. Worst of all, though, was the acrid stench of smoke and burning plastic in his nostrils, which was making the feeling of being suffocated even worse.
His first instinct—upon regaining consciousness—was to cry out for help. For a few moments, his mind was awash with confusion, and he couldn’t remember where he was, what had happened, or how he had gotten here.
Then, through the pain, the suffocation, and the frightening darkness, it came back to him. The EMP, the flash of light on the horizon, the missiles that streaked across the city, and an explosion.
An enemy missile, it had to have been. It had hit this very building, either on this floor or the one above or below it. But it had been the middle of the afternoon—why was everything now dark?
“Help!” Jack groaned again, but there was no response. He coughed, choking on smoke and the fumes of burning plastic. He found it increasingly difficult to breathe and knew that if he didn’t get out of here soon, he would die, if not from smoke inhalation, then from an even worse death from the fire that was undoubtedly spreading through the building.
He quickly realized that no help would be coming and that the only person who would be able to get him out of this situation was himself. Jack found that he could move his right arm, and he felt around him, trying to figure out where he was and how he’d arrived here. From what he could feel, he was on the floor, and the wreckage of something heavy—probably his work desk—was on top of him.
That would mean he had been blown against the inner wall, sandwiched between the wreckage of his desk and probably the shelves, books, and the wall.
If it had been a brick wall, he would have been dead. As it was, though, it was merely a weak form of drywall that had absorbed much of the impact and had caved in when his body had hit it. Something pinned his left arm, but he was able to move his feet at least a little. A weight was pressing down on his chest, but by wriggling his torso and hips around, Jack was able to draw his knees up into the space to get some pressure off his sternum.
Once he’d regained some mobility, Jack started kicking and could feel the desk—or whatever it was—moving a little. He thrashed with more force, more frenetically, and eventually, it shifted enough that the pile of books covering his head and shoulders—which was the reason he thought he was in complete darkness—collapsed.
After that, he was finally able to see again, and while he could breathe a little easier, the smoke was only getting thicker. Jack knew he had to get out fast. He saw the flames right away; they were raging through the communal space of the office just beyond his door and were spreading with voracious hunger. As for his own office, it was almost entirely unrecognizable. The wall dividing the communal space had been blown out, and everything in his office had been destroyed. Jack guessed that he had only survived becaus
e the wall and his big desk had absorbed much of the explosion’s force and impact. He could see that the missile hadn’t hit this floor but rather the one above it. The whole ceiling was simply gone, and Jack could see up into the burning wreckage of the level above this one. He surmised that this was another reason he had survived. If the missile had hit his floor, the force of the explosion would surely have killed him.
Jack checked himself over, and aside from a few cuts and scrapes, and no doubt many bruises, he had no serious injuries. Even though he knew he had to get out right away, he couldn’t leave in good conscience without checking to see if there were other survivors. With a lot of struggling, he managed to wriggle his way out from under the wreckage and got to his feet, coughing and wheezing. He kept a small bugout bag in his office, and he desperately needed it now, but where was it?
The tinted office windows were all blown out, and sunlight was streaming to combat the smoke-thick gloom, so he at least had some light to work with. He had kept his bag in one of the bottom drawers of his desk, which had been completely destroyed. However, he guessed that the bag and its contents would be largely undamaged, given that the drawer had been full of paper.
He got down on his hands and knees and searched through the debris-covered wreckage, looking for the distinctive bright-orange material of the bag. To his relief, he soon found it, stuck under a pile of splintered wood and ripped-up papers from the desk. He yanked it out and unzipped it, and after taking a long drink of water—he replaced the water bottle in the bag every week—he grabbed the gas mask he kept in the bag and slipped it on.
Survive the Day Boxset: EMP Survival in a Powerless World Page 54