Richard Cox - House of the Rising Sun

“Looks like a star, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah…except you don’t usually see stars during the day.”

They reached the woman in the sundress. She approached the driver’s side door. Her face was drained of color.

“Excuse me, sir. Do you know what’s happened?”

“I’m not sure. But I would guess it had something to do with that.”

Thomas gestured toward the new point of light in the sky, which was twenty or so degrees above the horizon, brilliant and white. It was bigger and brighter than any nighttime star but much smaller than the sun, which was almost directly above it. In different circumstances, like if he had been on his back porch, looking at it over the lake, the new star might have been the most amazing thing Thomas had ever seen. Instead, Natalie’s husband was trying to kill himself and the airport freeway was a war zone and the whole world seemed to have lost its mind. No vehicle was operational except his and people were noticing. Especially because, aside from the rumble of his engine exhaust, the airport was quiet. Eerily quiet. Nothing else mechanical was running.

Nothing.

The woman’s face was slack, her mouth wide open. She seemed to be holding back tears. Next to him, Skylar whispered words he couldn’t hear.

Something was terribly wrong about the silence. It was never quiet on this road, ever, not even in the middle of the night, because D/FW was one of the busiest airports in the world. The sound of jet engines and traffic was so ubiquitous you never even noticed it.

Until it wasn’t there at all.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the woman. “We have to go.”

Thomas inched his car forward. The woman’s eyes widened.

“Wait! Can you help me? I’m stuck here.”

Thomas kept driving, watching the stalled cars carefully. He picked up speed. Changed lanes often.

“Don’t you think we should have helped that woman?” Sky asked.

“Help her do what?”

“I don’t know. Get home. Something.”

“We only have so much room. We can’t take them all.”

Thomas realized why his car worked and the others didn’t. Honestly, he’d known it all along.

In his new screenplay, the one Skylar was here to discuss, he’d written about an apocalyptic event known as an electromagnetic pulse. The eponymous pulse in his story was the byproduct of a massive solar flare and had rendered useless every electronic device on Earth. The way this happened was technical in nature, but easy enough to summarize: Transistors and microchips and power transformers were fried by intense electromagnetic radiation, and anything that relied on them was rendered useless. Like for instance the entire power grid and just about every vehicle built since the 1970s.

His acquisition of the vintage Mustang, therefore, was no accident. He loved to drive it, but the reason Thomas had even considered a classic vehicle was because research for The Pulse had frightened him. In a world without power, without daily deliveries of food into large cities, chaos would erupt almost immediately, and a working car could mean the difference between life and death.

He’d never expected such an event to occur, at least not of the magnitude he’d written about in The Pulse, and maybe this was not that. Maybe the new object in the sky had generated a temporary disruption that would soon be over. But if the event was not temporary and the effect was anything like what he feared, it was imperative to push them as far away from the airport as possible.

But it was already too late. Thomas had driven maybe a hundred more yards when he heard it, the whining roar of a plane in uncontrolled descent. He looked in the direction of the sound just in time to see a sprawling, bubbling cloud of orange and black. The impact was maybe a half mile away. The shock wave arrived a moment later, louder than anything Thomas had ever heard, the sound so deep it hummed in his bones. Heat swirled around the car, a searing wind choked with the heavy smell of fuel.

Sky was crying. Screaming. People were climbing back into their cars. They were running away from the blast. Thomas drove as fast as he safely could, watching the fireball recede into the distance, but he knew they weren’t safe yet. How many planes circled the airport at any one time, waiting to land? Five? Ten? Fifty?

“Oh my God, Thomas. Oh my God. Is this because your car is old? Is that why it’s still running?”

“Should we stop?” he asked her. “Pick up someone? I could fit a couple of people in the back seat.”

“I don’t know! Maybe? I don’t know!”

Thomas reached into her lap and used his free hand to grab hers.

“Skylar, I’ll get us out of here. It’ll be okay. Trust me. I’ll get us to a safe—”

Before he could finish, another plane hit, just as close, somewhere behind them. The reflection of the fireball covered the entire surface of his rearview mirror. The heat was a hand that pushed them roughly forward. The air itself seemed to be on fire, shimmering and bubbling in front of him. Thomas kept driving. He tried to keep his eyes on the road, ignore the fireball, but it was impossible not to look at it.

The plane had landed on the highway in roughly the same spot where he’d spoken to the woman with the SUV. The woman who was dead now.

Skylar was still screaming.

“Don’t stop! I’m sorry but if we stop we might die!”

Thomas drove faster. People were fleeing on foot. They veered into the grassy median and were running north, away from the airport. They were children, mothers, teenagers in football jerseys. Thomas saw a man in an expensive-looking suit slip and fall headfirst, spilling the contents of his briefcase into the grass. Incredibly, the man stopped to gather scattering sheets of paper as people streamed around him. Thomas felt an instinctive need to pull over and help someone, like maybe the elderly couple that was struggling to make progress in the crowded median. But he couldn’t stop now. The car would be swarmed by helpless people trying to flee the airport. If he stopped here, they’d never get going again.

A few seconds later, another plane hit, farther away. Then another one, closer again, a massive explosion that dwarfed all previous impacts.

“Oh my God, Thomas! Oh my God!”

“I think that one hit the terminal. Imagine all the planes parked there, the fuel trucks…”

“Can we get to your house? Is that where you’re headed?”

“Yes. I think we can make it there. As long as the roads aren’t blocked.”

“Thomas,” Sky finally said. “This…this is just like your screenplay, isn’t it? Your car is still running because there aren’t any computers in it.”

He nodded. “The pulse must have come from that thing in the sky. I’m not sure but I think it might be a supernova. I read about them during my research, but they don’t happen very often. Everyone assumed if an EMP got us it would be a solar flare or a nuclear strike.”

“So that means everything is off? Power. Cars. Phones. The Internet.”

“Hopefully not. Maybe it’s not as bad as we think.”

Another plane hit then, this one to their southeast, a couple of miles away. Within seconds, a giant plume of smoke rose above the tree line, and now the entire southern sky behind them was apocalyptic. The horizon itself seemed consumed by fire.

“It looks pretty bad, Thomas.”

It had occurred to Natalie Black only recently that she’d wasted too much of her life relying on men. And it was no secret why. Her father, a strong, old-world patriarch, had ensured the women in his life never wanted for anything, so when lung cancer took him before Natalie could finish college, she felt as if she was left floating in space, untethered from reality. At that point she’d been dating Dan only three months. He was a gorgeous, wealthy kid with confidence to burn, and it wasn’t long before she pressured him into a short engagement and an even shorter, disastrous marriage.