John Birmingham: Without warning

‘Barney, is my family safe?’ asked Kipper.

‘They’re fine, buddy, they’re fine. Barb gave me your number. Look, I gotta go. The Guard can fill you in. I got a thousand calls to make now I found you. Just fire up that beacon, sit your ass down and wait.’

‘Bar-’

But the line cut out.

‘What the fuck was that about?’ he muttered. Shaking his head, Kipper knelt in front of his pack and popped the snap lock on the pocket containing his personal locator beacon, a small lightweight ACR Terrafix unit. He powered up the little yellow device and couldn’t help searching the skies, even though he knew his ride was probably still an hour away. Assuming it came at all, and Barney wasn’t now roaring with laughter, about to fall backwards off his chair. Who knew?

Sub-zero air torrents high above him stretched a few scraps of cloud into long white ribbons, streaming away towards the coast. He caught sight of a giant hawk as it dived into the valley, wings folded back.

‘Someone’s about to get eaten,’ he thought aloud.

Then he noticed the contrail, maybe twenty miles further north. The sky was crisscrossed with them during the colder months – great white arcs of vapour trailing the jet liners as they headed for Seattle, or the Pacific and the long haul to Japan or down to Honolulu. There seemed to be fewer than usual, just this one actually, and he had never seen a plane tracking so low over the Cascades before. His unease at the surprise call from Barney tightened into alarm as he watched the slow arc of the aircraft and realised it wasn’t going to clear the mountains towards which it was headed.

‘No,’ he whispered, aware that he almost never spoke aloud on his hiking trips, and that he was positively yapping his head off today. ‘No, don’t.’

His mouth was dry, and he drank from his canteen without thinking. The cold water hit his clenched stomach like acid, and for a second he thought he might vomit. That faraway plane, a thin tube of metal enfolding – what, a hundred, two hundred souls? – slowly, gracefully, inexorably speared itself into the side of a mountain, impacting just over the snow line, freeing great blossoming petals of dirty yellow flame to roll away into the morning air.

‘Ah shit…’

Kipper shook his head and took a few steps towards the small, roiling ball of fire, before he stopped himself. He would never make it, and anyway he had to stay here and wait for the chopper. He apparently had his own disaster to deal with.

Still, he had to do something. He keyed 911 into his sat phone, glancing down momentarily to check he’d got the numbers right. He could at least call this in. Maybe someone had survived – a ridiculous thought, which he recognised as such as soon as he’d had it. But he couldn’t just stand by with his thumb in his ass, taking in the view, could he?

‘Nine-One-One, which service do you require?’ The dispatcher sounded harried, and just as freaked out as Barney had been. But then, Kipper thought, that was probably her normal state of being.

‘This is James Kipper, chief engineer, Seattle City Council. I’ve just seen a passenger plane crash. A big jet.’

The dispatcher’s voice seemed almost mechanical, washed free of human affect by the multiple layers of impossibly complicated technology required to allow Kipper to speak to her from the side of this mountain in the middle of nowhere. ‘Sir, what is your location and the location of the incident?’

As Kipper told her that he was in central Washington state, in the lower reaches of the Cascades, and read his location off the GPS beacon, the soft rumble of the titanic explosion finally reached him.

‘Sir, please repeat. Are you outside the metro area?’

‘Yes, damn it. I just watched this plane go down in the mountains. It was flying out of the east and it got too low, and -’

‘Are you outside the Seattle metro area, sir?’

‘Yes, I -’

‘Your call has been logged, sir, but we cannot dispatch anyone right now. Please hang up and leave the line free for genuine emergency calls.’

And with that he was cut off.

‘What the fuck!’ he said, loud enough to startle a flight of birds from a nearby tree. A mass of snow, disturbed by their take-off, fell to the ground with a soft, wet crunch.

Twenty miles to the north, a pillar of dark smoke climbed away into the hard blue sky. A secondary explosion bloomed silently in the heart of the maelstrom on the face of the granite peak. Kipper was still staring at the phone in disbelief when the sound reached him.

The car park of the Safeway on Broadway East could be a challenge at the best of times. Barbara’s little Honda had picked up three mystery scratches or dents in there over the past six months. But today it felt like genuine hell. With one hand she was trying to control a heavily laden trolley sporting at least two malfunctioning wheels, while carrying a sobbing child on her other arm and attempting to redial Kipper’s number on her cell phone. The parking lot was full of hysterics and loons, some of them normal people who’d gone over the edge, others professional nutbars who’d turned up with sandwich boards urging everyone to REPENT as the HOUR OF DOOM was AT HAND!!!! The signs looked quite professional, as though they’d been prepared much earlier for just this occasion. Barb had taken a small measure of childish joy from clipping one of the God botherers with the corner of her fast-moving, barely controlled metal shopping cart.

She was less pleased with the long scrape she gouged out of the paintwork as she stumbled and lost her grip on the cart just as they made it back to the car. ‘Shit!’

Suzie, who at six years old was way too big to be carried, one-armed or otherwise, for more than a few steps, struggled to clamber deeper into Barbara Kipper’s embrace. ‘I’m scared, Mommy,’ she cried.

Struggling with her daughter, Barbara lost her grip on the cell phone – a cheap clamshell model – which fell to the bitumen and broke in two. ‘Oh shit! Oh… I’m sorry, sweetheart. Mommy’s sorry. Just hop down, would you, and…’

Suzie, her head buried in Barbara’s neck, shook her head and wailed, ‘Noooo.’

‘Suffer the little children unto Him, good lady…’

Barb spun around to find that one of the religious nuts had followed her through the heaving crush of the car park and was holding aloft a small branch of some sort, waving it as if to bless her.

‘Suffer the little -’

‘I’ll fucking suffer you to get the hell away from me, you goddamn freak! You’re scaring the bejesus out of my daughter.’

She fixed him with such a baleful stare that he actually seemed to recoil as if struck, but Barbara, who was normally so conscious of others’ feelings, felt not the least bit contrite. This place was a madhouse. It was like people had gone nuts or something when the news first came through, and these holy fucking lunatics were only making it worse.

Barb managed somehow to lower a clinging Suzie down to the ground while digging her keys out and thumbing the car’s electronic lock. It opened with a reassuring bleep-bloop, lessening her fears that whatever had happened might have put the zap on all the electrics. Back in the store, some bearded panic merchant had jumped up onto a checkout to announce that an ‘electromagnetic event’ had taken out all the circuits, everywhere. Unfortunately for him, the automatic conveyer belt on which he was standing was entirely functional and it jerked forward, pulling his feet out from under him. The last Barb had seen of the man, he was lying on the floor of Safeway with a badly broken ankle.