John Birmingham - Without warning

‘Okay,’ she said, making up her mind. ‘Crew first. They work for their passage or they get left behind. We’ll start here, at the marina, by putting out word we’re offering a berth to qualified hands. But you and I might head out tonight, hit the right bars, gather the first of our flock. We can trawl the international hotels tomorrow, looking for passengers.’

‘And where will we offer passage to, Miss Julianne?’

‘Somewhere big and safe and far away. Somewhere the toxic cloud won’t reach. Somewhere that can feed itself. Defend itself, if need be.’

Shah gave her a quizzical look, inviting her to go on. Jules nodded at a framed photograph fixed to the starboard bulkhead. It showed the boat’s previous owner, Greg Norman, teeing off at Royal Sydney.

‘In for a penny, in for a pound. Let’s take his boat back home for him, shall we?’

The scientist droned on, baffling everyone with his impenetrable waffle and jargon-bluster, and in the end it all came to ‘We don’t know shit’.

‘The phenomenon remains non-responsive to magnetic resonance scans,’ said Professor Griffiths. He was a small, round, red-headed toad of a man who’d added yet one more element of misery to Tusk Musso’s existence since his arrival at Gitmo with the National Laboratory team to study the Wave. ‘The precise mechanism by which the phenomenon effects the transubstantiation of certain organic matter to energistic potential remains non-obvious

As he burbled on, the general surreptitiously checked his watch. Griffiths and his eggheads had flown in a few days earlier from Seattle, via Pearl, and Musso remained convinced that Mad Jack Blackstone had facilitated the move as some sort of malicious practical joke. Given the paucity of findings the Nat Lab guys had so far turned up, Griffiths chewed up an enormous amount of Musso’s time and energy with resource requests he simply could not fulfil.

‘Our investigations continue,’ the scientist concluded.

Man, I hope that’s a conclusion, thought Tusk. ‘Any questions?’ asked the Marine, getting to his feet and addressing the room.

Everyone remained unnaturally still. They had learned never to give Griffiths an opening. Ask him how high the Wave went, and you were liable to get a half-hour dissertation on electron orbits.

‘Very good,’ said Musso hurriedly. ‘Bang up presentation there, doc, as always. You keep at it. Get back to us with anything new, of course. But don’t feel the need to interrupt your research otherwise -’

‘Well, about my research, General. This exclusion zone you’ve established along the line of the phenomenon -’

‘Is not open for discussion… Sergeant!’

A Marine Corps gunny rolled up to the podium like an Abrams tank with the throttles thrown wide open. He double-timed Professor Griffiths out of the conference room, closing the door firmly behind them.

Tusk relaxed slightly. He wasn’t being unfair. Everyone had been intrigued and even a little excited when Griffiths had arrived with two pallets full of scientific equipment, but exposure to the man, coupled with a rapid realisation that neither he nor anyone else had yet figured out jack shit about the Wave, tended to dampen that enthusiasm.

He was a five-star pain in the ass.

‘Okay,’ said Musso, with more relief than was seemly. ‘I can see we lost two or three KIA from boredom there. Not a bad result. Ensign Oschin, you got my PowerPoint files ready?’

‘Coming online now, sir.’

‘Thank you, Oschin. Put it straight up.’

General Musso rubbed at a freshly scabbed-over bloodspot on his shaved head. He’d knocked a small divot out of himself fucking around under a desk earlier, fixing up a data cable that’d come loose. His fingers came away with a few tacky spots of blood and he had to pat down the wound with a piece of tissue paper while he waited for the vision from the Global Hawks.

Two of the giant, experimental UAVs were over the continental US at that moment, covering Miami and Kansas City. In contrast to the first moments after the Disappearance hit, when everyone had been wired and speeding on fear of the unknown, the feeling in the expanded op centre was now resigned and sombre. Everyone knew what to expect from the footage. Empty cities. Deserted streets. Massive pile-ups on the road networks. Some burning buildings, many more charred ruins. Stillness. Ditches and craters of burning ruin in the fields where aircraft had gone down over what many called ‘Flyover Country’, in the Midwest. Where there should have been cattle or horses, there were charred spots and grassfires, especially in west Texas.

Mega-fires still blazed across the length of America, spewing unknowable tonnages of pollution into the atmosphere. Thankfully, there had been only two meltdowns in a couple of older nuclear plants when the auto shutdowns failed – at Browns Ferry in Alabama and Hartsville, South Carolina. On the other hand, many coal-fired plants went up for want of human attention or computer intervention. But in these two metro centres at least, the worst of the conflagration was over. Indeed, it never really started. Cold, soaking rain had hosed down most of the initial outbreaks in Kansas City. An airliner had speared into a power station in Miami, killing the grid before an untended waffle iron or hair curler was able to burn down half the city. Satellite imagery confirmed similar strokes of luck had spared dozens of other cities, but hundreds more had been incinerated. The number of population centres lost came to thousands, however, once you counted all the minor towns and burgs that had gone up for one reason or another.

‘Miami on the right-hand screen, KC to the left, General.’

Musso thanked Ensign Oschin again, even though the two cities didn’t look much alike and there was no trouble telling one from the other. The footage of Kansas City was trisected by a meeting of the Kansas and Missouri rivers in the centre of the metropolis. No beaches, that was for certain. Musso had been to nearby Fort Leavenworth during the course of his career, for some joint-forces training with the US Army. It had been the coldest winter he had ever experienced and he certainly wasn’t eager to go back there any time soon.

‘Okay,’ said Musso, as he turned to address the tightly packed group of officers seated on plastic chairs behind him. ‘This is a highlights package, cut together an hour ago from twelve hours of coverage by our two Hawks.’

Fifteen men and women had squeezed into the small room for the briefing, including Lieutenant Colonel Pileggi, who’d flown up from Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras the previous day. The senior SOUTHCOM representative sat in the front row with a notepad and pen at the ready. She and Musso were supposed to present a plan to Ritchie that evening to evacuate any and all US citizens who wanted to go, from South and Central America to an as-yet-undetermined location. It meant moving hundreds of thousands of people God only knew where. But certainly not to Gitmo. It already had a diabolical refugee problem.

Musso thumbed a control stick and brought up the first set of images. Still shots from the downtown areas of both cities. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing new to report here,’ he announced. ‘Just better imaging than we’ve had so far. The power grid in both cities has failed, meaning there’s less chance of a catastrophic urban firestorm starting up, although spot fires continue to break out here and there for whatever reason.’

Musso examined the Kansas City screen, which displayed the footage of a burnt-out Quiktrip on Armour Boulevard, across from a post office and a couple of larger buildings in Northtown. He never could keep all of Kansas City’s various townships and municipalities straight when he was there. The Heart of America Bridge along with the Paseo and Hannibal bridges showed evidence of multi-vehicle pile-ups, some of which had combusted and later burnt out in the schizophrenic weather of the Midwest. A train had derailed on the ASB Bridge next to the Heart of America and dumped itself into the Muddy Mo. One of the towers, he couldn’t tell which one, looked like it had been slashed with something – probably a Cessna or a Learjet from Downtown Airport.