I will contact you all when I feel it is safe. I have no idea when that will be. If you don’t hear from me again, you can guess what happened.
PREPARE FOR THE WORST!!!
She hated exclamation marks but thought they served a critical purpose here. The message had a certain tripping rhythm, a stumbling hysteria, and she knew it would be effective. She’d met most of the men in these groups over her nine months with Doug, and they were almost always wild-eyed with burgeoning panic and twisting theories, even on a calm day. After this message, there would certainly be a blood-pressure spike. And then the grid would go down in the West, and they would remember the message, the vague warning of something big coming, and of government lies. From there…
Time would tell.
And she was running out of it if she wanted to join Eli by dusk.
55
Twenty-nine miles outside of Chill River, Eli Pate told Jay to turn off the highway.
They were in a basin, with mountains in the rearview mirror and empty big-sky country ahead. Foothills snaked up to the east, Jay saw out his window. Power lines traced the low points, carefully laid in the places of easiest access, even if that was a bit of a joke-there was no easy access to the lines in Montana in the wrong kind of weather, and when you needed to get to them, it was usually the wrong kind of weather.
“We wait here?” Jay said. It was a desolate spot but they were far from the lines and he could see no purpose for this location other than its isolation.
“No, no. I want you to watch something.”
Pate reached into the backpack that rested between his feet and brought out a pair of binoculars. Zeiss, high-end. He lifted them to his eyes with one hand, the other still on the gun, finger still on the trigger. Jay followed the angle of the binoculars. There was a road far to the northeast, nearly out of sight to the naked eye. Beyond that, the countryside was empty. There was nothing to see, and yet Pate said, “Tremendous,” and lowered the binoculars and passed them to Jay. “All yours, my friend. The show belongs to you.”
“What am I looking at?”
“I’d recommend you watch the access road directly in front of you.”
Jay lifted the binoculars and adjusted the focus. He finally found a single fir, neatly cut, leaning on the power lines at a forty-five-degree angle. It was just as they’d had in the Beartooths on the day all this had started, only down here there was no blizzard to contend with.
Jay thought, It will take the boys all of ten minutes to clear that shit.
“Cute work,” he said.
“Keep watching,” Pate said.
Jay kept watching. Nothing happened. His hands and eyes tired from the effort and he was about to ask just what in the hell he was supposed to see when dust appeared to the west. An oncoming vehicle. A few seconds later, it was close enough for him to identify: a bucket truck.
He’ll lose his good humor when he sees them at work, Jay thought. They’ll have it fixed in less time than it took him to cut the tree down.
The truck lumbered on down the road, the cloud of dust gathering in its wake like a storm. There was a dip where the road met a small runoff stream, but the water was low and there was a grate to make vehicle crossings easier. The truck would be able to get close to the tree, and the crew would make fast work of it.
He was about to say as much when the truck’s front wheels made contact with the grate, and then it exploded.
Jay didn’t immediately understand what had transpired. One instant the truck had been rumbling along and the next it was a mangled mess of broken metal and glass, and the cattle guard itself seemed to be inside out.
“What did you do!” Jay shouted, and Eli Pate laughed, low and soft and extremely pleased.
“I should have kept the glasses. You got all the fun. A good show, it seems?”
Jay had actually moved the binoculars away, but now he lifted them again and, in horror, panned the landscape until he located the truck.
“You planted a bomb for them,” he said. His voice was hollow. All of him was.
“Not at all. Take a closer look, Jay. That is simple technology at its finest. Trapped energy. That is all we did. We coiled the energy that the world is filled with, and we let it speak for itself.”
Through the lens, Jay could see what was left of the truck-the front and back ends were intact but it was crushed in the middle as if pinched between a giant’s thumb and index finger. One man struggled to crawl out of the passenger window. His blood ran down the remnants of the door panel and joined a pool of steaming fluids dripping out of the engine. He was fighting past something that at first appeared to be a part of the wreckage, but then Jay saw that it wasn’t a piece of the truck but rather the steep, angled sides of the grate. They had snapped shut on the truck like a wolf’s jaws.
“Why?” Jay said. “For the love of God, what is the point of this?”
“Not the love of God, Jay. The absence of one. Absence of both love and God, actually. I hate to shatter any illusions you might have previously held, but the world you occupy is a cold one, and no one listens. No one cares.”
He sounded restful, an old man on a porch chair, close to dozing off.
“You had questioned the thoroughness of my approach. You don’t need to tell me that; I’ve seen it on your face from the start. So let’s discuss it now. I’d appreciate your review. Your beloved bride will certainly appreciate your review. Understand?”
Jay held the binoculars half raised, staring at the carnage in the distance. Without the zoom, it looked like nothing more than a dust cloud.
“Within the next few hours,” Eli Pate said, “a number of utility trucks are going to meet with problems in very desolate locations. I expect that will create a strain on manpower, not to mention equipment. But your kind is used to crisis. They will respond. While they deal with these problems, my own crews will reassemble elsewhere. They’re equipped with grid maps and a fine understanding of the most remote areas on the system. They could continue to cut trees and create faults, of course, but that is so frivolous, child’s play. What they will do instead is wait for you. Because when you take down the transmission lines from Chill River, what will happen?”
“A massive outage,” Jay said. His voice sounded disembodied.
“Exactly. And think about all the lines out there that will suddenly be dead, harmless. Now imagine what fast work one could make with chain saws on the actual utility poles themselves. Without any risk from the current, I think they can bring down many lines in a hurry. And my understanding is that your sophisticated computer monitors won’t know where this is happening, because the system monitors depend on the current to identify the problems. But there will be no current, and therefore they will be blind. Am I correct so far?”
He was correct. He was also brilliant. Taking the transmission lines out would cause a massive problem, but it would be temporary. If he had teams working with chain saws in the mountains, though, taking down line after line, and then transmission was reenergized with no idea of all the faults that awaited…Jay could picture the grid map on his office wall, and he thought, Good night, Seattle. Good night, Portland.