If a mission to Mars had landed on that undiscovered planet and the astronauts had descended onto its barren rocky surface only to find that their radios were tuned to a broadcast from Olympus Mons, the effect wouldn’t have been any stranger than it was on the four Warwickians who sat and listened to the details of a news broadcast from a place they had only known through reputation. They crowded around the small radio there in the water plant and listened to a report about some crazy German who was about to jump out of a capsule that hung from a parachute on the edge of space. Apparently, with all that was happening in the world, somebody, somewhere, someone of great importance, had decided that a man perhaps jumping to his death for notoriety was newsworthy, while the society crumbling around them was not.
The reporter breathlessly turned away from the description of the day’s and week’s events, of the tales of hunger and societal breakdown, of the scrambling of the governmental elites to contain the situation, to speak of a daredevil, a Mr. Klaus von Baron, who at that very moment was stepping onto a platform and seeing the wide world float through space beneath his feet. The reporter described it all. Millions of people were watching the event all over the world on YouTube, the newswoman reported. After completing what the reporter called “his egress checks,” Klaus von Baron stepped off the platform and threw himself toward the ground, and the reporting paused as he began his awesome free-fall.
There were gasps and oohs and aahs coming from the newsroom as the newswoman described the event. “Klaus von Baron has begun to spin slightly. From the deck of his capsule we can see that he is disappearing into the haze of atmosphere and distance. There is, of course, a fear that he might go into an uncontrollable flat spin that could cause him to pass out.” The reporter relayed these facts as though the audience perfectly understood the machinations of velocity and turbulence, but it was necessary to say them anyway, just as a record for the times. The audience was informed that von Baron had a special parachute that would automatically activate if the g-forces came to be too much and he lost consciousness.
The four sat and listened. The reporter was openly speculating about whether or not von Baron was going to break the sound barrier, when the four Warwickians, listening around the radio, heard a loud pop, and the radio went dead.
Simultaneously they heard an intense, buzzing hum, and from the doorway of the water plant they saw an old transformer atop a power pole, one that was no longer even operating, blow completely off the pole. As it did so, they heard a frightening explosion from the power junction box about twenty feet inside the building. It suddenly burst into flames.
Peter knew immediately what had happened. Somewhere, up in the atmosphere, and probably not too far away, a “super-EMP” warhead had detonated sending a wave of supercharged electrons piling up on one another until they had burst outward, like when the sound barrier is shattered. The resulting massive wave of electromagnetic energy had spread throughout the atmosphere and imploded the grid of electric energy, and with it the comforts and hopes and aspirations of the world’s long climb to what modern man recognized as civilization.
At the moment, Peter was one of the few people in the entire world to know that everything had changed. For everyone. Forever.
CHAPTER 16
Tuesday Afternoon — Election Day
The etiology of disaster’s onset and the projection of its effects are never easy things to pin down, but history does provide examples for our consideration. On March 4, 1918, in a small town in Kansas, a cook at an army training camp called in sick. Within a week, over 500 men in the camp had contracted the illness, and the virus had spread all the way to Queens, New York. Within a year, approximately fifty million people worldwide had died of what came to be known as the Spanish Flu. Up to 30% of the world’s population contracted the disease. Coupled with the concurrent devastation visited upon the world in the four short years of World War One, wherein sixteen million people died and another twenty million were seriously wounded, you can see how quickly things changed in the four short years between 1914 and 1918. The lesson for us is that history can turn on a dime. All the sophisticated machinery of modern civilization is no match for the wild rampage of nature and the brutality of human ingenuity.
While this may seem like an extreme example—as if a wartime virus is worse than the collapse of the electrical grid upon which modern society is built—consider the fact that when the lights go out, there is no medical equipment for use in treating disease. There is no transportation to get food or people or supplies from one place to another. There is no telephone to call the police when the criminals show up at your door. There is no Internet, no security alarms, no heating or air-conditioning to tame the elements. In a grid-down situation, and especially if that situation is caused by a massive electromagnetic pulse, there is no gasoline, and there are no automobiles to need that gasoline. There is no refrigeration to cool food in the concrete jungles that house most of the world’s population. When this disaster occurs, there will only be darkness, and stillness, and whatever you hold in your hands, head, and heart to face down the long night.
The EMP strike over Ohio on Election Day in America was the crime of this and perhaps any century, and it would lead—eventually—to over 300 million deaths just in the United States, and many billions of deaths all over the world, but no one knew that yet.
At the very beginning, it was like the call coming in to the kitchen staff saying that a cook won’t be in that day. It was like a woman who was involved in a car wreck and broke her neck, but she didn’t know it yet. An hour later, she was talking to a cop, and she turned her head to point out to him exactly where the collision occurred, and the cop heard the snap, and her head fell to the side, and the body fell limp to the ground.
There is a delay between the moment when a trigger is pulled, and the moment when a target is struck. That interim—that delay, however long it lasts—is when the world continues to move and decide based on the old reality and on facts that are now immaterial. It is in that interim that decisions are often made that will eventually determine who lives and who dies.
No one had yet figured out what had happened, although people knew from the fires and the smoke and the already eerie noise of the gnashing of teeth in the stillness, that something had gone terribly wrong. But no one yet had recognized its permanency.
Still, in that moment, a few kept their heads.
Veronica D’Arcy was sitting in her kitchen in her warm house in Harlem, writing in her journal, when the lights went out.
She’d been thinking a great deal lately of her late husband John, a gem of a man, gone too soon due to a heroic attempt to save a woman who’d fallen on the tracks from a subway platform years ago. The woman was saved, but her husband had not survived, leaving Veronica to raise their son by herself.
In the way that thoughts sometimes seem to tumble or intermingle like towels in a dryer, or how one thought brings us inexorably to another, Veronica’s thoughts about her husband, and heroism, and the life of responsibility, led her to recall the man named Clay Richter who’d recently stayed at her house for a night. Apparently, Clay had lost his whole family in an automobile accident. The simple, sweet man had touched her life through an act of kindness towards her son, and now, as she sat thinking about Clay and his escape from the city and his search for liberty and peace, she began thinking about family and the loss of it and the need to protect her own.