“All the xanaxed-out Hollywood types in Los Angeles have gone batshit crazy because of a teensy bit of nuclear fallout and they’re burning down all the Neiman Marcus and Prada stores as we speak. The Los Angeles inferno is lighting up the night sky all the way out to Barstow…”
Federal Heights
Salt Lake City, Utah
Jimmy McGavin woke up in a fugue state.
“What?” He sat bolt upright, profoundly disturbed by something. Maybe a nightmare?
He could hear his neighbors talking outside his bedroom window. It sounded like a normal conversation, but it alarmed him on several levels.
First, his alarm clock hadn’t gone off and, as he glared at it accusingly, he could see it wasn’t lit.
Second, his neighbors never talked like this. Sure, they would talk at church, and Federal Heights was as friendly a neighborhood as one could find in America. The friendliness had a lot to do with the fact that ninety percent of the residents belonged to the same Mormon “ward.”
The LDS Church, or Mormon Church, permeated every aspect of Utah culture and, arguably, had resulted in Utah remaining a promised land, at least for believers. Living in Utah, especially in Federal Heights, was like living in the 1950s set of Leave It To Beaver. The wholesomeness didn’t only benefit Mormons. Everyone living in Utah enjoyed the friendliness and safety the Mormon Church brought. In most parts of Salt Lake City, kids still trick or treated door to door on Halloween. Few metropolitan areas in the U.S. could say the same.
Even so, neighbors didn’t stand around chatting on their lawns, especially not at 7:00 a.m. on a weekday—or whatever time it was. They should have been heading to work.
Then he remembered. Things in the world weren’t right. Someone had exploded a nuke off the coast of California. Another bomb had been detonated two days earlier in Saudi Arabia—the first nuclear weapons to be fired in anger since World War II. The stock market had been halted by the SEC, and Los Angeles had descended into a war zone with mass evacuation and raging civil disorder.
For the life of him, Jimmy couldn’t figure out how the attacks were connected. He could not see the connection between the Saudi bomb, the stock market halt and the California bomb. Why would two nuclear attacks take place within two days of one another half a world away? It made absolutely no sense.
News out of California yesterday had been a horror show. For policy reasons, the state and federal government were being slow with information, but every post hitting Facebook had been worse than the last.
The afternoon before, an internet blogger had captured video of a dead baby strapped in her car seat, sitting in the bushes alongside Interstate 15 while cars passed by at a crawl. While nobody knew why the baby had died, the Facebooker implied that the child had perished from radiation poisoning. Mainstream media ran jaded reports claiming that the story about the radiation-dead child might be Russian-sponsored fake news, but the TV stories only succeeded in driving more people to watch the footage of the dead baby. True or not, each view and share cartwheeled southern California into greater chaos.
According to CNN, the Los Angeles Police Department had detected a radiation signature off Alameda Harbor ten minutes before detonation. Thankfully, the bomb had gone off three miles out to sea, and less than a hundred people had been killed by the nuke itself. The dead had been boaters, the police helicopter crew, a Coast Guard patrol boat crew, and several dozen Los Angelinos who had crashed their cars because of the blinding flash. Direct damage to Los Angeles wasn’t catastrophic; it was more typical of a large earthquake than a nuclear weapon. Thousands of windows had been shattered and hundreds of people had minor injuries from flying glass.
None of that explained why the southern half of California had come completely unhinged. Nobody could say for sure how much radiation risk Los Angeles faced. Millions of tons of mud and water, possibly radioactive, had been torn from the bottom of the ocean and misted over greater Los Angeles, most of the moisture wafting along in the atmosphere.
Despite the minor damage, the coastal region from Santa Barbara down to San Diego had become the sixth circle of hell. Millions of people were trying to claw their way out of California just to get anywhere else.
Waking up to an avocado pit of fear in his stomach felt like the morning after Jimmy’s dad died three years ago. The next day, Jimmy awakened in pretty good spirits, only to remember that his life would never be the same. His dad had died. A dark cloud had overtaken him. He had been forced, secretly, to see a therapist, but he had quit going after a couple of sessions. Digging into his feelings was making it hard for him at work, and there had been an unspoken possibility that he might actually choose to leave his wife if he kept doing the therapy.
Nothing, not even his life, was worth losing his family. He was definitely a true believer in the Mormon faith and, as a Mormon, one’s personal well-being took a back seat to one’s family. So Jimmy swallowed it all down and eventually worked his way out of the funk through prayer and scripture study.
Jimmy couldn’t tell what the neighbors were saying outside his bedroom window, but he could hear the occasional laugh, incongruous considering what had happened in the world.
Jimmy got out of bed, careful not to disturb his wife, and approached his closet. He might still go into work, but for now he grabbed his track suit. He and the track suit shared a love/hate relationship. He knew it made him look fat. Every time he put it on, he felt a dose of self-loathing, hating his body and hating his inability to control his weight. But the track suit was definitely comfortable, and he relished not feeling a leather belt cutting into his gut.
Jimmy pulled on his running shoes and slipped out the front door, careful not to slam it behind him. The neighborhood guys stood in his next-door neighbor’s side yard, surrounding a small red generator.
“Ah, darn. Did we wake you, Jim?” Ron Marsdon asked.
“Nope. I was already up,” Jimmy lied as he walked over to join the group.
“We were just wondering what time was too early to fire up the genny. Power’s out at your place, too, right?”
Jimmy stabbed his hands into his track suit pockets and joined the circle. “Sure is. Has anyone heard what caused the power outage?”
“Tom called the power company on his cell phone, and the recording said there were ‘widespread brown-outs in the Salt Lake Valley.’”
“Tom’s cell phone worked?”
“Yeah, so there must be some power somewhere. They’ll get it going again. If not, I’ll bet the Church lights some fires under some butts!”
Federal Heights was only about ten blocks from the headquarters of the Mormon Church, and Church headquarters probably wasn’t getting power from the grid, either.
Another neighbor, who Jimmy only knew as Brother Buchanan, chimed in. “The Brethren will get it handled. Or… maybe it’s the Second Coming.”
The guys all chuckled, finding it only partly humorous. For more than a hundred and seventy years, the Mormon Church had been predicting the end of the world. In the seventies and eighties, the leaders of the Church, “the Brethren,” had counseled members to store a year’s supply of food, to set aside drinking water and to grow a garden. “The end was near,” the Brethren had said.