I could second-guess a billion decisions I’ve made in my life, but some of them, despite my worst efforts, turned out pretty well. I can’t take any of the credit for the kids and their successes because I wasn’t nearly as involved in their lives as I should have been. I was selfish. I was wrong. I know that now, but at the time nothing else seemed right. If I’d been half as committed to Sophie while she was alive as I was after she passed, a lot would have been different between us. You can’t make things up to a dead person, but I tried anyway.
That’s not to say I didn’t know how lucky I was before I lost her. Fortunately, I’d woken up in time. Sophie was amazing in so many ways. Her ability to forgive me being one of her most ridiculous or admirable traits, depending on which side you saw it from. I missed every part of her a little more each day. Her beautiful laugh, her shy dimpled smile, and the glow of a proud mother around our kids—I missed it all. I could still see her holding each of our babies in her arms at the hospital, pushing them in the swing, dancing with them in the living room, swimming with them in the lake. Every thing. Any thing. But man, her laugh.
As the tears running down my cheek began to compete with the raindrops on the window next to me, I wiped my eyes and tuned back in to Mom and Dad’s conversation up front. Dad was talking about how unexpected this was in America. How this is something you’d expect in the poor, hungry, and sick countries. And yet, he said, “We still should have seen it coming.” He was right. America had made an awful lot of enemies recently, but I never thought they could hit us like this.
Here we were, caught in a real-life reenactment of Red Dawn, that movie where the high school kids form a rebel band to combat against a West Coast invasion. But we weren’t looking for a fight. There was no one for us to save. And we didn’t get to just sit and hide. We had to run, right through the middle of those who wanted us dead, and towards the same place every American would be heading—if they’d also gotten the message. Like a herd of elephants crossing a thinly iced lake, we’d be hard to miss, and any misstep by one of us could be the last for all of us.
I couldn’t help but wonder what fate awaited us. If we did survive the trek across America, would Hawaii still be a safe zone? And even if it was, how long could we possibly live there, cut off from the rest of the world? What were we even supposed to hope for at this point? What were realistic expectations? I had absolutely no idea.
Hope is a loaded word. It can keep you going when you have it, or stop you dead in your tracks when you lose it. Trust me. The hardest part is persevering when it seems all hope is lost. I had a feeling we’d be testing our resolve on this trip. Probably more than once.
It was a little less than three hundred miles to Cabela’s from the cabin, about seven to eight hours at this pace. I turned my attention back to the darkness outside. The whole situation defied explanation. I couldn’t imagine how the entire attack had been carried out, or how far reaching the residual effects went. How many other survivors were out there, equally as bewildered and overwhelmed as we were?
FIVE: “How It Went Down”
After September 11, 2001, the military commanders of eight of the world’s most powerful militant countries met privately and discussed a joint venture to rid the world of America. Permanently. Counting on a full-scale retaliation for the Al Qaida attacks, and anticipating the superpower’s significant long-term distraction by that Middle East focus, these eight countries cemented their pact: China, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Japan and Libya. (Cuba withdrew after their government collapsed in 2017.) Twelve years of planning, followed by six years of implementation, and only a single week of execution. They used America’s severe oil shortage and ensuing economic crisis to barter for what they needed to build and pull off a massive chemical and electromagnetic attack. “The Seven” created a new Russian car company, Lakaya, they wanted pushed in American markets. If the U.S. government promoted them on par with Ford, Chevy and Dodge, Russia would provide all the oil the U.S. needed. It was a no-brainer for U.S. politicians—lining their pockets and creating thousands of stateside transportation and dealership jobs—and served as a perfect Trojan horse for The Seven. Essentially, the U.S. financed its own demise.
Japanese and Russian chemical engineers manufactured automobile insulation packets for all Lakaya vehicles, with a deadly airborne contaminant strong enough to choke the oxygen out of any living being within seconds. The contaminant became lethal only when combined with the compound encapsulated in the detonators, which were packed securely inside the steering column of every vehicle. An accident, no matter how severe wouldn’t crack the compound capsule or mix the chemicals. The capsules could only be opened and detonated remotely, with a shared code, from a mainframe far away. When detonated, the airbags served as the propellant for the mixing and initial distribution of chemicals. Small vehicles were packed for small towns. Bigger vehicles were prepared for bigger towns and cities. Specific model distribution was organized accordingly. Ultimately, the bigger the vehicle, the greater the resulting contamination zone. A motorcycle could kill everything within two miles. A bus could expand that range tenfold. Airplanes could cover one hundred miles, easily, but they were only used at a dozen locations, the eleven largest mainland airports and one in Hawaii. The Federal Aviation Administration’s constant inspections made chemically packed airplanes too risky to mass-produce and distribute. Their placement was far riskier and had to be coordinated the exact week of the attack.
Vehicles, on the other hand, were mass produced in China, packed and branded in Russia, and stocked in Asian ports until the planning stage was complete. They were then shipped to, and distributed throughout, the United States. Grateful for the economic assistance, the U.S. opened its ports for the next several years to freighter after freighter of these automobiles with a blind eye towards inspections. Lakaya, as promised, became extremely in demand to American consumers, and over a million of them were quickly scattered across America, thousands in every state.
The Seven took no chances, however. Operatives specifically parked an additional twenty thousand vehicles in key locations across North America, in both the United States and Canada. In doing so, The Seven managed to get a bomb within five miles of every operable airport and occupied residential area of fifty thousand or more nationwide, military zone or civilian, without so much as a whiff of suspicion. It was impossible to cover every square mile, of course, but they were sure going to try.
Six hundred thousand chemical car bombs went off in silence just after 1AM Eastern Time, on October 13, catching and killing nearly half of all North Americans in their beds. Pedestrians collapsed wherever they stood, gasping for clean air and finding none. Others heading to or from home at that time died through vented exposure in their cars, crashing randomly throughout the affected zones. The chemicals contaminated water supplies and killed off all proximate human and animal life forms within each lethal distribution radius. Beyond the people living and working within those immediate impact zones, another ten percent of the population merely traveling through those areas, (by train, plane or automobile) within the forty-eight-hour toxic window also died.